Great Sky River (original 1987; edição 1988)

Benford, Gregory. Great Sky River. 1987. Galactic Center No. 3. Aspect, 2004.
I like to imagine Gregory Benford sitting in a theater in 1984 watching Arnold Schwarzenegger terrorize California in The Terminator. He must have thought, I can do this in my Galactic Hub series and make the mechs more plausible. Three years later, that is exactly what he accomplished in Great Sky River. Having discovered the hostile mech civilization at the center of the galaxy, humans have begun to settle multiple systems trying to grab a toehold in which they can survive. Great Sky River is set on a colony planet where things have not gone well. The ecology has been devastated by mech invaders and only a few bands of nomadic humans survive to wage a feeble insurgency. They scavenge and adapt what they can of mech technology and struggle to maintain their cultural heritage. By this point in the series, Benford has a solid grip on where he wants the six-novel sequence to go. Epic space opera at its best. ( )

A bit of a stretch for Benford -- gritty, nasty, and planet bound, and hence more modern than most of his work and much of what was published in the 1980s. On a colony planet in the far future, humanity consists of a few hundred people in small tribes constantly on the run (literally) from intelligent machines. Those machines gradually and violently took over the planet and are now terraforming it to their own needs. Most machines actually don't care about people, killing them only when they get in the way. A few though are hunting people down and sure-deathing them, i.e., not only killing them but sucking up the memories that would normally be saved on chips and carried by the remaining colonists.

Most of the book relentlessly follows this theme, getting grotesque in certain parts not unlike Banks or other more recent space opera. But every once in a while, some message arrives to reset the plot, straight out of pulp SF 1930s roots. This was the biggest flaw of the book for me. To an older reader of SF in the 1980s, this probably made the grimness of the book more palatable and familiar. To a reader of modern SF, it's jarring and damaging to the integrity of the story.

Another flaw, annoying but not fatal, was Benford's need to explain everything. The colonists have no understanding of te sophisticated mech suits they wear, part human-built, part cannibalized from the machines. To make sure the reader knows he did his world-building homework, Benford keeps tossing in paragraphs about how things works always tagged with some form of "unknown to Killeem" or "without Killem's understanding".

With the caveat that you need to be prepared for some deus ex machina plot shifts, I recommend this as an above average entry in Benford's Galactic Center series. It is not necessary to have read the previous books. ( )

Benford is one of the SF greats and Great Sky River one of his great books. As an act of imagination it's a triumph, as a piece of storytelling and writing it is by turns soaring, lyrical, and poetic. And sometimes it falls a bit flat on its face. That's OK because in the main Great Sky River works very well and the failings are because Benford seems to be pushing his considerable talents as a writer to the limit - and those sorts of failings you can easily forgive.

So sometimes he over-indulges himself with explanation, and sometimes he doesn't quite break free of the preconceptions of his own era. As a result the narrative can meander or jerk in a few places. On the other hand his views of machine intelligence, its struggle and failure to understand organic life and the catastrophic consequences that result, all told through the story and characters of this bold novel, are as thoughtful and profound as anything you'll find in fiction.

It's his gifts as a writer, his empathy with the human condition and universe-building that make me think of him as a kind of Ian Banks of his era. Except in Benford's universe humanity lives in no perfect culture. The glory days have long gone, mankind is flat on its face and struggling to rise again. Still bold and brave, still striving to understand, broken, bloody, and in its beaten and bested way still magnificent. ( )

Storia abbastanza originale, suscita anche una discreta curiosità ma è purtroppo appesantita da troppe divagazioni “psicologiche” e/o da "sparate pseudo-culturali" (non saprei come definire le lezioni degli Aspetti e della Mantide) a discapito delle vicende più avventurose dei protagonisti. Intendiamoci, molte di queste riflessioni suddette sono più che apprezzabili in quanto riguardanti questioni etiche, culturali, evoluzionistiche, emotive, ecc… ma sono eccessive nel numero e spesso ripetute.
Nel complesso, comunque, un libro discreto, direi un 6½ ( )

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