Up against it

English language

Published 2011 by Tor.

ISBN:
978-0-7653-1515-1
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OCLC Number:
651912995

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2 stars (1 review)

Geoff and his friends live in Phocaea, a distant asteroid colony on the Solar System's frontier. They're your basic high-spirited young adults, enjoying such pastimes as hacking matter compilers to produce dancing skeletons that prance through the low-gee communal areas, using their rocket-bikes to salvage methane ice shrapnel that flies away when the colony brings in a big (and vital) rock of the stuff, and figuring out how to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance motes that are the million eyes of 'Stroiders, a reality-TV show whose Earthside producers have paid handsomely for the privilege of spying on every detail of the Phocaeans' lives.

Life isn’t as good as it seems, though. A mysterious act of sabotage kills Geoff's brother Carl and puts the entire colony at risk. And in short order, we discover that the whole thing may have been cooked up by the Martian mafia, as a means of executing …

1 edition

Review of 'Up against it' on 'Storygraph'

2 stars

I was surprised by how much I didn't care about this book. It's similar to Wool in some ways -- strong plot, lots of flying around and jumping up and down and running from bad guys in a tight resource constrained environment... but everyone (bar the Viridians) are so HUMAN. So American, even. You could almost believe they're in a small town in the midwest, what with "Joe Spud" and the hard scrabble life.

This is what lets down the story -- these guys have nanotech. They have nanocameras watching their every move for the sake of a reality TV show. They have a reputation based management system. And yet... it's still not even half as good at reality shear as Bruce Sterling on his worst day. It reads like a soap opera. And the intrepid group of 17 year olds who always find themselves in the middle of the …