On the Steel Breeze

On the Steel Breeze is the second novel in the Poseidon's Children trilogy (series?) by Alastair Reynolds. The Akinya family's still in the protagonist role but the series didn't turn out to be the kind of family saga I was expecting -- hoping, even. I don't know how the Akinyas managed to squander their riches but they did have the time: this novel takes place a couple of centuries later. Only a single human generation has passed, though: aging having been defeated once again.

With the exception of Sunday's line, other Akinyas are apparently no longer worth mentioning even by name. I think the only time they're really implied to exist is when Sunday passes to old age and others supposedly attend the funeral. I guess Reynolds wasn't that interested in telling another family saga. 

The protagonist and viewpoint of Breeze is -- or are -- Chiku who is Sunday's daughter. When the Akinyas still had money, Chiku went through a cloning operation, becoming identical triplets with identical memories. The Chikus are able to sync their memories via tech now lost to time with the defunct company that did the cloning operation. The triplets use the color codes Red, Green, and Yellow to distinguish themselves apart, though each Chiku is just Chiku to herself. Somewhat unusual a main character, I would say.

Chiku Red, assumed dead, went after the Akinya family matriarch Eunice who zoomed to the stars on her Winter Queen. Chiku Red had a more advanced, faster ship, which was supposed to catch up to Eunice and bring her back home.

Chiku Green embarked on a "generational" holoship fleet traveling to the aforementioned Crucible planet that was found in the previous novel. The holoships use the not yet fully-understood Chibesa physics to reach relativistic speeds and lack the knowledge of how to brake at the destination, hoping to develop the means on the journey. That seems like hell of a gamble to me.

Chiku Yellow remained on Earth, living in Lisbon, Portugal. She also has an estranged son who became one of the aquatic people.

I suppose the main theme of the novel is artificial intelligence, or maybe non-organic life. I wonder if the novel's title is related to that somehow. It seems to be a reference to a Pink Floyd song.

The start of the novel has the mystery vibe from the previous volume but the plot starts to drag quite a bit later on, and feels like it doesn't get to the point it's going for, like it's being saved for the third novel.

I'm not sure what to think of the way Reynolds tells Chiku's backstory in almost an infodump way via a merman who wants her to come visit them. It's kind of lazy and weird, not a real life thing -- only happens in stories when the author wants to concisely describe a character to the audience.

I like how Hannu Tervaharju translated merfolk to 'vetehiset' from Finnish folklore. The 'provider' bots he left untranslated, which kind of makes sense but the word does still stick out in the Finnish text. 'Crucible' does so as well. It has a corresponding Finnish word in the heat-resistant container sense but 'Upokas' would sound quite weird in the more abstract sense as the planet's name it's in this novel, so that gets a pass from me.

On the holoship Chiku Green is on, the Zanzibar, there's a character called Travertine. After I had finished the novel, my sister, who had read it in English, informed me that for Travertine, Reynolds used gender neutral ve/ver pronouns. In the Finnish translation, this is not apparent in any way, once again due to the Finnish language only having a single third person pronoun for people. It is fascinating how big part a language is to a culture. Finland would have a lot less of the current day nonsense if American culture didn't have as strong of an influence here.

It amuses me to no end that English, a mix of at least three different language families with so many words, has come up with all these different alternatives, yet the confusion causing plural 'they' is what has actually become established as the neutral one. Even Swedish with its gendered pronouns managed to solve the problem so gracefully with 'hen' (from the gendered 'han' and 'hon').