On the Steel Breeze Audiobook By Alastair Reynolds cover art

On the Steel Breeze

Poseidon's Children, Book 2

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On the Steel Breeze

By: Alastair Reynolds
Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
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The award-winning author of Blue Remembered Earth continues his saga as the next generation of the Akinya family crosses interstellar space seeking humanity' s future...

Chiku Akinya, great granddaughter of the legendary space explorer Eunice and heir to the family empire, is just one among millions on a long one way journey towards a planet they hope to call their new home. For Chiku, the journey is a personal one, undertaken to ensure that the Akinya family achieves its destiny among the stars.

The passengers travel in huge self-contained artificial worlds - holoships - putting their faith in a physics they barely understand. Chiku' s ship is called Zanzibar - and over time, she will discover it contains an awesome secret - one which will lead her to question almost every certainty about her voyage, and its ultimate destiny.

©2013 Alastair Reynolds (P)2013 Hachette Audio Adventure Fiction Genre Fiction Hard Science Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Space Opera
Engaging Plot • Complex Characters • Immersive Performance • Compelling Protagonists • Intriguing Mysteries
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The book itself is pretty good, but it's honestly rather hard to tell with the incredibly annoying accents the narrator does

Another solid book from Alastair Reynolds

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The storyline is not disappointing but I did have some trouble with the narrator's heavy accent at times. attribute this to my superannuated ears.

A very complex narrative

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The storyline vaguely continues, and like everything else by Reynolds has a 15-hour build up until you hit something interesting that makes you decide to finish the book.
The narrator...wow. The first book had a narrator that was so exceptionally difficult to understand that I created a "black list" of narrators just to prevent ever accidentally getting something by him again. I was especially looking forward to this and the 3rd book being by a different narrator....obviously a result of reader complaints I assumed.
Boy was I mistaken. This narrator was even more difficult to understand. The main character sounds like yodeling Yoda with a cold trying to mimic Scooby Doo. It drove me nuts. And the accents trying to give african characters some realism just alienated readers because we cant understand it. I dont know how many hundreds of words & sentences that were lost to me, and going back 30 seconds never helps because they are completely and entirely incomprehensible.

Such a slow storyline + bad narration = fail

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Humor, joy and wonder, this is high end sci fi. Alastair Reynolds read by Adjoa Andoh is just about perfect.

Impatient For The Third Book

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What made the experience of listening to On the Steel Breeze the most enjoyable?

I liked the way the narrative shifted between the two cloned protagonists. The world of this series — a future in which Africa and China became the superpowers — is refreshing.

What about Adjoa Andoh’s performance did you like?

Adjoa Andoh has a lovely voice, and her voicing of the main character(s) was impeccable.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

It was satisfying to catch up with some of the characters from the first novel in the series.

Any additional comments?

The director did Ms. Andoh a disservice when s/he had her voice practically every character with a different national accent. The effect of multicultural diversity could have been achieved less jarringly, particularly with the male characters. This is not a reason not to listen to her marvellous reading of this highly interesting novel, however.One final suggestion: when different actors read novels within the same series, it might be less confusing if the recurring characters are not voiced in a radically different way.

Excellent second novel in series

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Is there anything you would change about this book?

I would change the premise. The triplicated main character and the nonsensical re-emergence of and old acquaintance...oh so very contrived. The pace was languid and the switching of perspective was jarring. The motivations of the characters especially in their interactions with each other were silly and unbelievable even in the whimsical world Reynolds has crafted. All in all, this is a very disappointing installment in this series. It fails to live up to the level of the Revelation Space series.

What do you think your next listen will be?

Starplex by Robert Sawyer

Would you be willing to try another one of Adjoa Andoh’s performances?

Oh dear god no. Her thick, overdone accents were almost literally painful to listen to, from the simpleton Asian accent to the literally unintelligible MurPerson accent.

Was On the Steel Breeze worth the listening time?

Honestly no, I would not spend 23 hours listening to this given what I know of its resolution.

Any additional comments?

This was a very weak installment and feels like a filler novel. That said, I am a completionist, so I finished it, but I am having serious doubts about the third installment.

This book could use a "breeze" of fresh air.

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A fascinating view of humanity in the future. The saga of the Akinya clan continues.

As good as Blue Remembered Earth.

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This series still starts slower than some of the books by this author, but easily makes up for it with the complex plot of three characters each changing their perspective. with a time span covering decades, and the continuation of characters from the previous entry in the series this book will keep readers engaged equally as well as other entries from the author.

The sophomore entry in Posiden's Children...

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Taking the history he created in ‘Blue Remembered Earth’ forward another generation, Alastair Reynolds succeeds in teasing the reader’s interest in the alien mystery waiting at the end of a 200-year old journey, but keeps the scope of events surprisingly restrained for an author known to write in cosmic epochs that laugh at stacks of expired civilizations. Again, he keeps his dramatic perspective on one single family, which can really be said to in fact be one person, duplicated across three cloned bodies who occasionally synchronize their mind states. This concept I found fun, and made for some interesting moments as the separate lives of our tri-fold protagonist, Chiku Akinya, reconciled herselves with the existence of multiple husbands/lovers and families at either end of her dual lives. There is also some great world building here within one of the main settings for the action, the asteroid-sized holoship traveling as part of a caravan to a new and promising alien world. Reynolds, in 2001’s "Chasm City", has previously written about a rivalry between en-route colony generation ships which violently escalates once the prize comes into sight, but with much more believability here. The other two setting loci, Earth and the destination world of Crucible, both have similar challenges for the Chiku heroines in the form of an all-powerful artificial intelligence willing to kill in order to ensure it’s own survival. Like Chiku, this intelligence, Arachne, has been cloned across two distant star systems, but these have remained un-syncronized, and have begun to drift apart in their thinking towards humanity.

The story has well-paced action scenes that don’t rush in too close together, and characters that are compelling to follow, though a bit too saintly and flawless, I felt. I think a reader who hasn’t read the earlier story would feel unsatisfied with this one, and clearly too many questions remain unanswered to give up on ready the series now.

Adjoa Andoh’s narration is impressive for it’s commitment to thickly, haltingly accented English coming from a variety of multi-national characters, but being impressive is not the same as being enjoyable. Whether it’s the baseline Swahili accent of the protagonist, the guttural fish-man accent from the aquatic mer-people, the crafty old lady variant of the earlier swahili accent (this one used for no less than 3 characters), I found them all just a little too over-the-top. I’m sure I’m revealing my own anglocentric cultural bias here, but my ear just needed a rest from the added work of mentally decoding every spoken word. The final straw for me was the dual accent-fail for Chiku’s two significant others, Lucas and Pedro. I want to write about how offensively bad they both are, but I… just.. can’t listen to that exaggerated Texas drawl or caricature Mexican again. Let me instead just stick to my complementary remarks, however- and it’s genuinely the case that Andoh makes a very ambitious effort which must have been quite exhausting, and I know I have no such talent at all.

Earthier, narrower, more feminine than AR's work

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This was a joy to listen to. I am putting off a book I had in mind so I can go right to the next book.

Perfect voice. I can't wait 2 C what happens next

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