Keith's Reviews > Elysium Fire

I found this disappointing, despite generally being a fan of Alastair Reynolds' work. For most of the book, I found it reasonably engaging if a bit laden with Captain Obvious writing and very obvious allusions to current politics (in the audiobook, a certain character really does sound like Space Nigel Farage). Unfortunately, the finale dragged the whole thing down with a silly "final battle" seemingly lifted from a bad video game, a "mwahaha, let me explain my evil plan and give you a sadistic choice" villain, and plot points literally being explained twice to two different POV characters.

I feel like Reynolds has moved too far away from the cosmic horror and/or intense noir-y feel of his earlier books, into drier and more prosaic stories driven by characters that tend to be a bit bland. Notably, some of the plot points/twists involving memory in this book are reminiscent of his earlier Chasm City, one of my favourite of his books, but nowhere near as effective. Even the predecessor to this book felt much darker and more baroque, with the strange twisted AIs, messages from the future and legions of killer robots. The most obviously horrific element of this book, people's brains cooking from their cybernetics going haywire, was mostly kept "offscreen", which I think was a mistake.