Brian's weblog

I started in on Alastair Reynolds' _Century Rain_ last night, got about halfway through before I finally succumbed to sleep. It's a good read: finally he gets to have at least a few chapters that don't involve pervasing nanotechnology or uploaded personality constructs or galaxy-spanning machine intelligences.

I was thrown at first, however, because he's got a system-wide human government named The Polity, and just last week I had finished reading Neal Asher's _Line Of Polity_, in which *his* galaxy-wide human government (also named The Polity) is considerably more powerful, and somewhat less conflicted, and certainly motivated by different things. It took me a while to put that Polity out of my mind.