Bone Silence

Bone Silence is the finisher for Alastair Reynolds's Revenger trilogy. The young ddult fiction aspect really started to be a thing in this one. The novel feels way too long with its nearly 700 pages (in the Finnish translation). Quite early on I was already wishing the story would just skip to the part where the mystery of the setting would finally be explained.

Due to the Ness sisters upsetting the quoin-based economy in Shadow Captain, they now have a whole armada after them. And the armada's leader is the most YA villain imaginable. Reynolds conjured up his typical completely crazy character but this time the person is practically a kid, too -- as bone readers need to be. The whole chase across the system felt pointless. Dialogue often felt like a waste of time and I started skimming over it.

Both Fura and Adrana are viewpoint characters in Bone Silence and I got them constantly mixed up at the beginning for them being at the same place. Once they got properly separated, I had easier time remembering which was which. I had hard time remembering what the rest of the crew members were supposed to be, too.

The revelations at the end were pretty satisfying -- actual explanations for what's been happening in the setting's history. There is room to continue developing the world but maybe not this way.

The Finnish translation was by Hannu Tervaharju as usual. His 'ajan oloon' seriously bothered me in this one because it appears so many times and it's definitely a mistranslation of 'for the time being' at least once. There's one line, probably close to something like "We're safe for the time being" originally. Saying 'ajan oloon' (instead of 'toistaiseksi') would mean the being safe is a condition that is becoming a thing over time, not a thing that is currently happening for an indefinite amount of time. I wonder if the mistranslation comes from how 'ajan oloon' kind of looks like a literal translation of 'for the time being'. Or maybe Tervaharju thinks the Finnish expression has a different meaning -- which would be odd but not impossible.

I would now be out of Reynolds novels -- for having read his whole long form bibliography -- but his latest, Halcyon Years, came out just recently (translated). It seems to be a fairly popular one because all the dozen copies in the local library network are currently borrowed. I'm not in a hurry, though, as I have bit of a pile of other books to get through.