I was born in Wales, but raised in Cornwall, and then spent time in the north of England and Scotland. I moved to the Netherlands to continue my science career and stayed there for a very long time, before eventually returning to Wales.

Weird times to forget reason. This is where I tapped out. The captain has to make a huge decision, and ignores all reason and the lives of her people to chase this thing, Ahab style, even though she's made it very clear that she is doing this by democracy. And the weirdest part is, the thing they're following? They know where it's going! So why chase it when a better equipped team can meet up with it later? I did have to make a list of all the people named in the book, just to figure out who were the main movers and such here. Including the one who arrived on that other, rival, chasing ship, Wang, who was important in growing needed things, including the door key. Some bits of the book were funny to me: the reaction to Finding Nemo film watching, what to do with the slightly-hostile looking penguin mascot on the side of the ship, Schrope the company guy reading "The Firm". The anchordoll huffed. “Well, we machines may have something to say about that!” (с) Gee, I love these anchordolls already!It isn’t widely discussed outside the medical section. It’s something we hoped never to have to put into practice.” I listened to the audio version and the narration was FANTASTIC! He did a great job of portraying all the characters, especially the female ones, and gave them each an individual personality and voice. Exactly the reason that I LOVE so many sci-fi books on audio when they are well done. Very long time space colonization caught in time paradoxes, alien artifacts, and a literally endless battle for dominance between different fractions. The Fountainheads warn Bella that the Musk Dogs can't be trusted and that some technologies are far too dangerous for a species ill-equipped to handle them, though the Fountainheads do not know the Musk Dogs true intentions. Svetlana (in defiance of Bella's advice) trades with the Musk Dogs for a passkey in return for access to Janus. The attempted construction of the passkey leads to an outbreak of replicating femtotech causing many deaths, at the same time it is revealed that the Musk Dogs are not tapping energy from Janus but priming the moon to explode so as to blow a hole in the wall of the Structure. The dropped / forgotten plot points were quite disappointing. There was like two lines mentioning that Janus (the moon) had some kind of intelligence that was aware and mildly amused by the primitives riding on it, but it was never brought up again at all. I still don't understand the benefactor stuff at all. Bella never had the interview with CNN that the future humans listened to and worshiped as if it was Gospel.

The Fountainheads are able to rejuvenate humans, healing injuries and making them younger. The only restriction is that they cannot heal brain damage without the patient losing part of his/her personality. Bella and several others undergo rejuvenation to make themselves younger. Those that are rejuvenated still age, but more slowly. Another several decades go by as the Fountainheads and the humans co-exist. The Fountainheads are trading advanced technology with the colony in exchange for drilling rights on Janus, whose core is a vast energy resource.The weird times to forget science. The space mining, distance-measuring, dealing with disasters...all that seemed pretty logical. And then there was the smoking on a ship (with real cigarettes!), a found object fish tank where "only" the fish were added weight (how do they get water in this ship? How would 50+ gallons being taken out not be noticed?) and a doctor hellbent on killing people, it seems. corporation seems to have been hiding his fact, she begs for a turnaround, and turns against Bella when she refuses. This

I've been known to suggest that Reynolds's novels are a bit too long, and this one is as long as his others, but I betrayals. At the same time we are given a tense story of survival in an alien environment, which I found interesting CENTURY RAIN (2004) A murder mystery in 1959 Paris opens a can of worms for struggling PI and jazzman Wendell Floyd. Space opera, parallel worlds, jazz, etc. A personal favorite of mine, although I’ve sworn there will never be a sequel. TERMINAL WORLD (2010) Wales Book of the Year finalist. Steampunky action on a dying world, with a mystery under the skin of things.

HOUSE OF SUNS (2008) Clarke shortlist. Six million years in the future, starfaring clones, tensions between human and robot metacivilisations, King Crimson jokes. This was a very enjoyable novel to write, especially after the claustrophobic THE PREFECT and I think it shows. Again, I would like to return to this universe but I have no fixed plans for when that will happen.

the ultimate fate of intelligent races. It's not perfect: I've already quibbled about a couple of things, and Reynolds absolutely amazes me as a writer. He's an astrophysicist who worked for the European Space Agency so he writes hard sci-fi, with exceptions made for the story, but his writing is also absolutely excellent. He keeps the story evolving throughout the book in a way that means it could easily have been split into three less suspenseful stories, which is much more typical these days. There's not only an ongoing mystery of what Janus is and who the aliens are, there are also multiple situations along the way, each with their own resolution. The suspense just never let up in this one. I ended up not being able to read it before bed because I would go to bed too tense. I ended the book feeling like events that happened in the first third of the book were distant memories. This ship is diverted to chase a moon of Saturn, Janus, which has suddenly accelerated and headed out of the The main problem for me is the characterisation. It's all so cardboard cut-out, thrown-together stereotypes, as if stereotypes are somehow okay as long as you mix them up a bit; everyone's reasons for doing things are either underexamined or just make no sense. The only person who feels vaguely non-cardboard is Jim Chisholm, and as a result he feels like the hero, which given the state he spends most of the book in, doesn't really work. Oh, but what of the two main protagonists, you ask? Shouldn't I like those? Two strong women! I'm not quite sure how they're meant to qualify, though. One does everything for her long-dead husband and the other spends a decade maintaining a temper tantrum. Er, yeah.What I liked about this book is that the characters acted as I would expect. When the ship is told to give chase, the crew becomes divided and one-time best friends, Captain Bella Lind and Chief Engineer Svetlana Barseghian, find themselves at odds. Bella wants to catch up to the moon and discover its secrets, while Svetlana desperately wants to go home. The two women become leaders of opposing factions and the rest of the plot stems from this fracture, with incredibly far-reaching ramifications. This is solid hard sci-fi, the story of a human crew pushed to do something extraordinary, and what happens to them under the pressure of it all. The narration takes a bit of getting used to. The. Narrator seems. To insert pauses. In random. Spots. But in the end I quite enjoyed the delivery. Janus turns out to be a spaceship in disguise, and the people giving it chase are the unfortunate souls on board of a ice miner who just happened to be the nearest when Janus took off. Big Dumb Object: Janus, the Spica Structure and the unknown megastructure. Each following is much bigger than the previous one. Bella and Svetlana have a HUGE falling out over this, and the women - who were once good friends - become bitter enemies. The resulting conflict is threaded through the remainder of the novel.