Great Sky River, by Gregory Benford

To start this rant, what upset me the most in this Galactic Center series is the abrupt change in gears between volumes 2 and 3. What starts out as an interesting story about first contact (vols. 1 & 2) becomes a Mad Max kind of story of survival of the fittest in a hostile environment. The first half of the book, although mildly entertaining, is just that. There's is barely anything in the way of the science fiction that I came to appreciate Benford for writing. (Then again, I've heard somewhere that the Galactic Center Series is his space opera.)

The story progresses well, meaning that is has something in the way of good pace, but it is really a scenario that has been explored countless times in bad science fiction. (It smells a bit like movies in the vein of Damnation Alley and Mad Max, with the difference that it doesn't happen on Earth.) Even though the setting has aged and been overused, there are a few interesting ideas there, though only a few.

Humanity has scattered around the galaxy in order to survive the confrontation with the mechs, a mechano-electronical, artificially intelligent race. In the planet Snowglade, the survivors had settled in citadels where they did nothing but reuse known technology for all kinds of purposes. That lasted a while until the mechs destroyed most of the citadels putting humans on a constant race of evasion and survival. Humans incorporated technology to extend their senses, to communicate with one another, and even to move faster. There's a little bit of discussion about these technologies, and that kept me interested for a while. I liked the notion of implant-extended brains that store dead personalities recovered from flesh and blood humans before they physically die. I liked the notion of "intelligence" scattered around the components of a mechanical being in some kind of distributed processor or memory. These bits, however, are tiny nuggets of ingenuity in a vast expanse of cliches.

In spite of all this potential, though, the book is not at all what I hoped it would be. It is borderline silly at times (the barking manmech being the apex of bad taste) and has not even a smell of good science fiction. I may continue to read the series due to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies not to leave a story before it's concluded and only when I need brain dead reading material. Besides, from this rock bottom low, it can only get better. Or can it?