Amazingly, my thoughts on The Recollection by Gareth L Powell are exactly the opposite of most of the reviews I’ve read. The book is a character-driven page-turner that kept me captured throughout its length. It became obvious to me that I was reading a different book. The Recollection, second addition, must be a total rewrite of the original with all the issues raised in prior reviews having been addressed, corrected, or the storyline improved. The author now has a five-star book.

In the book, two seemingly disparate stories, each action-driven, come together in a logical Sci-Fi sort of way toward the end where a final confrontation takes place against an alien end-of-times weapon. One thread takes place in near current times with the opening of planetary portals on the earth. These mysteriously appear in random locations and only lead to human habitable worlds. Few people entering the portals come back and those that immediately do return months later due to space-time differences. Most go on using interconnecting portals that they find on each world. If they don’t settle down on one of the visited planets, they continue using a portal network that ultimately leads to a technically advanced future world. The intended result of the portal network is the human habitation of the galaxy. However, who the portal builders are and the intended purpose of the portal network isn’t revealed until the end of the book.

The second thread involves the challenges and experiences of a space trader pilot and her estranged lover. After her character is developed and her fate mysteriously hinted at, she becomes the person who delivers the ultimate alien-developed countermeasure used to push back the weaponized self-replicating swarm bent on destroying all human and alien development.

While it would be satisfying to know that the swarm gets defeated, that’s not how the book ends. Humans and their peaceful alien hosts have only found a way to hold back the swarm temporarily allowing them time to escape to a nomadic habitat built by the alien hosts designed to preserve humanity by keeping it out of the swarm’s path.

The book is an excellent stand-alone novel that could also be used as the first book in a series should the author select to continue the story. Even though Amazon’s book description indicates that this is a second edition, it has linked the low-rated reviews from the previous addition to it. This is unfortunate as those reviews have become misleading with the second edition and will cause readers to hesitate when considering the April 27, 2021 addition for their next read. ( )

Good space opera. Little people on a big playing field. Starships, ancient races and an unstoppable threat. Great stuff. ( )

I didn't particularly like the ending e.g. why are they wasting their time saving non-viable specks of flesh that don't even count as unborn babies when there are real people dying? Plus Kat could do so much better., but overall it was an easy, entertaining read. ( )

Reading this, I was quite disappointed with a number of aspects. I thought many of the ideas were rehashed and the plot a bit on the slow side. The characterisation is also not deep enough to be truly satisfying. On the other hand as the book progressed, some more interesting elements emerged: the play on lapsed time, the recollection itself, the partial infestation of Kat, the role of the aliens. If these had been introduced earlier and then more fully explored, it would have been a better book. Without that, it only manages to be a little above average. 13 December 2017 ( )

This review requires a hefty caveat: I am a total neophyte in the Science Fiction world. Apart from some childhood dabblings in Asimov, and the occasional short story, I have literally no experience of the genre, or indeed of genre fiction more generally. I've always read what people call "literary fiction"; calling a novel a "page-turner" turns me off, and to me, a good novel has to be more than just a good yarn.

But I read a newspaper review of "The Recollection" on the internet, added it to my wishlist on a whim, and then forgot about it until it showed up under the Christmas tree. And I'm very glad that it did! So in writing this review I'm also exploring where I feel drawn to next as I probe the multifarious SF universe.

It's obvious that there are two basic components of a book like this, a conceptual framework as well as a narrative: I suppose I'd call them the "ideas" and the "story". Obviously an SF novel needs both, to some degree, and in this one I think the two are quite nicely balanced.

The "ideas" are satisfyingly awesome: a rich galaxy with enough consistency to be believable but enough variety to give a sense of its vastness; wormholes which don't violate relativity and thereby give rise to a fun kind of "virtual" time travel. There is an implacable ancient menace which I thought required a little more backgrounding, and a benevolent alien race about which the same could be said. The opposition of these two was a little too Manichean for my liking. Some early chapters are set in a very near-future with just a few ever so slight variances from our present, which I liked a lot. And the far future developments seem well thought-out in the context of the starting point: technology evolves in a rational way and people still drink beer and shoot guns in the 25th century.

The "story" didn't interest me as much. The intertwined subplots are both standard quest/redemption tropes which progress towards an orderly conclusion. The main characters are adequately drawn but there's not much nuance in their motives or actions, and some of the dialogue I found quite scripty. Perhaps I'm asking too much of a genre novel though? On the other hand the writing never jars or bogs down; Powell's prose fizzes along with unselfconscious brio. And I guess with the "ideas" side of it to communicate, there isn't a great deal of room left for getting inside people's heads. Nonetheless, I'd still like to see a novel with the conceptual canvas of "The Recollections" but with beefed up psychological insight and complexity of motive.

In conclusion, not a bad way at all to pop my SF cherry, and I'll certainly be back for more. ( )