by Robert Reed
In the far future (ten million years hence), the human race is lead by a caste of families that augment themselves with posthuman abilities. The older the members of a family get, the more powerful they are. And some of the oldest have created something new at the core of the galaxy (if you read Egan’s Schild’s Ladder, you’ll know what they created).
Some of my favorite novels are fixups. Accelerando. Mindplayers. Sometimes an author takes some short stories who have shared elements and glues them together in such a way that the whole is more than just a sum of the parts. Sometimes. More often the fixup-process works against the bigger story. At first I thought Sister Alice was great. The first part introduced the main players, the main conflict and made me hunger for more. But then the rest of the book just stretched some thin plot elements until the final mystery is revealed near the end.
The ending is one of those that, at least to me, felt like a cop out. At the end you’re back to where everything started from. All is a cycle. Blarg. That might work in short stories (reminded me of The Days of Solomon Gursky by Ian McDonald), but as a book ending I thought it was rather disappointing. Another problem was that for the whole time the two main characters, the youngest Chamberlain and Alice, remained ciphers. Inscrutable. I never felt like they became real characters, just figure heads to move the plot forward. As for the secondary characters, they were even worse off, changing their motivations at every turn to propel the plot forward.
Still, I don’t want to make it sound worse than it is. Sister Alice has a plot who makes most of the time sense and has indeed a nice finale (before the ending). It’s well written. The future setting is marvelous imagined. I just think that these stories read individually better, packed together they don’t work as well.
Rating: 3/5
