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Original Title:	This Alien Shore
ISBN:	0886777992 (ISBN13: 9780886777999)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	Alien Shores #1

This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)

C.S. Friedman

Mass Market Paperback | Pages: 564 pages

Rating: 4.04 | 3402 Users | 226 Reviews

Be Specific About Of Books This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)

Title	:	This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)
Author	:	C.S. Friedman
Book Format	:	Mass Market Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 564 pages
Published	:	July 1st 1999 by DAW (first published 1998)
Categories	:	Science Fiction. Fiction. Space. Space Opera

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TL;DR version: The bastard love-child of Dune and Neuromancer, but the awesome kind of bastard-child, the one that ends up forging his own destiny and writing his name in the stars. Longer version: I read this book as a teenager, and was deeply affected by it. Later, I read it as an adult, as was not-quite-so impressed anymore, but C.S. Friedman's world had sunk its claws into my mind, deep: the idea of Code as poetry, as art, became a bit of an obsession with me. If this review is vague and lacking in some specific details, it's mostly because I think other reviewers have discussed the plot and the characters -- book's been out for a while, after all -- and I think my contribution needs to be centered around my personal experience. For everything else, there's google. I read this again today. And the critiques of it--from my early twenties--withered and died till only one of them was left. This Alien Shore is one of the most beautiful implementations of starfairing humanity I've seen. The Guild is a hybrid of the Bene Gesserit and the Navigator's Guild of Dune, with politics and powerplays and complexity, but ultimately an entirely *ethical* worldview and objective. It's Dune without the soul-twisting. And the treatment of FTL...the anniq, the dragons...it will leave readers breathless. Without ever truly *talking* about it, the entire novel expresses and uplifts the hunger for starflight, the hunger to extend the threshold of our reach as individuals and as a species. The plot has two threads--one follows a young girl, a repository of great and unknown secrets, on the run from Earth and its corporations. The other is Lucifer: a virus that is wrecking havoc on the Guild's navigators, threatening the foundations of mankind's salvation--FTL travel through the rifts of space that bind all the worlds together. The computer/bioware aspects of this have many neuromancer-like components, but without the dystopian grit. The characters are true--true to themselves, if not to our expectations of them--they are individuals, deeply meaningful, their lives and hopes and dreams and fears sketched out in vibrant 3D. Relationships-professional, romantic, adversarial-all are true to their function and form, and heartbreaking in some cases, liberating in others. The complaints of my early-twenties were plot-related - that the pacing was off, certain scenes went on too long, others were not in the right places. This remains a mild criticism, tempered by the realization that back then I was young and impatient, and wanted to get to the "good bits". As a writer, I slowed down, appreciated the prose, the development, the subtle-but-necessary touches that made everything more. The one criticism that remains is that while the two plot-threads deepened and strengthened each others' themes, ultimately their intersection was not one of mutual resolution but of mutual understanding. That is...not a bad thing. But it doesn't bring the story full-circle in terms of action. The fear-and-threat felt so viscerally by the MC is not vindicated in a quite-satisfying way. Minus one star. But since this is getting graded on a 6-star scale, specially-made by me for the works that have influenced me so deeply, a full set of five stars remain. This is a beautiful novel, full of hope for the future. Humanity's discarded children rise above the pettiness-of-soul that characterizes so much of mankind's history. Deeply flawed individuals display nobility of spirit, and the diverse, the mad, the broken, make their way to where they truly belong--the stars. Read it. You'll be happy you did. And when you're done, perhaps you'll come to the same conclusion I did: We are all Variants, and Guera is our home.

Rating Of Books This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)

Ratings: 4.04 From 3402 Users | 226 Reviews

Rate Of Books This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)

This book was incredible. It reads like a thriller and has some incredible world-building. This is in the far future. Mankind's first experience had tragic effects. It scarred the early pioneers and destroyed spaceflight on the homeworld. In this future, there are many innovations. This is yet another book I've read - along with the Budayeen trilogy by George Alec Effinger and Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds - where man has developed a society and a dependence on technology implants.

Science fiction isnt usually my thing, but this was recommended to me by a friend, so I picked it up. Dont let the amount of time I took to read it fool you; there was a move, which necessitated a return of the borrowed book, then a chunk of time to organize and conduct the move and settling-in, then some more time to track it down again. This book is worth picking up and treating better than I did! Its interesting, has a compelling universe built to house the story, and the characters are

Transcendently good, pardigm shifting, mind blowing SF. Can't say enough good things about this book--I haven't read an SF book that made me think this much since I first read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (ultimate high praise coming from me).The novel deals with the cost to humans of interstellar travel, of, quite literally, what it means to be "human." In Friedman's world, the first "wave" of Faster Than Light (FTL) was accomplished by the Hausman drive, which, unbeknownst to its passengers,

I found this book an amazing speculative and futuristic thriller. The ideas are an interesting mix of cyber espionage and more classic space opera. Part of the plot hearkens back to an era of books such as Dune where the Guild controls space travel through the ainniq. Another part projects forward to a complex web of the outernet, brainware, and complex viruses that blur the boundaries between silicon and brain. The characters also are complex, rounded, and fascinating. Theres a touch of magic

4.5 stars Originally posted at Fantasy Literature.This Alien Shore is another outstanding science fiction novel by an author who Ive come to respect immensely for her extraordinarily creative worlds, fascinating ideas, complex characters, and elegant prose. If theres one flaw (from my perspective) with Friedmans work, its a difficulty in actually liking many of her characters, but even if you find that its hard to sympathize with them, its also hard not to admire them, or at least to see them as

I loved, loved this book as a teen. As an adult I'm a bit more critical--the science is flawed in a lot of places, and it could have used an editor's attention to the numbers given for times, distances, and populations, which frequently change by an order of magnitude from scene to scene--but you know what? It's still a fun book. And sometimes, what I really want isn't something shocking or deep or gorgeously written, but just reasonably paced adventuring fun. This has that in spades. Add some

Stuff I Read - This Alien Shore by C.S. Friedman ReviewThis is my first taste of C.S. Friedman's writing, though I've meant to read the Coldfire books for quite some time. It just never worked out, though now I might have to try even harder, because This Alien Shore is a very interesting book that explores what is alien, what is human, what is sane, and what is crazy. It's a big book, with quite a bit happening, but it really swirls around a very small number of characters, mostly Jamisia and