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This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)

C.S. Friedman

Mass Market Paperback | Pages: 564 pages

Rating: 4.04 | 3402 Users | 226 Reviews

Present Books In Favor Of This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)

Original Title:	This Alien Shore
ISBN:	0886777992 (ISBN13: 9780886777999)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	Alien Shores #1

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TL;DR version: The bastard love-child of Dune and Neuromancer, but the awesome kind of bastard-child, the one that ends up forging his own destiny and writing his name in the stars.

Longer version:

I read this book as a teenager, and was deeply affected by it. Later, I read it as an adult, as was not-quite-so impressed anymore, but C.S. Friedman's world had sunk its claws into my mind, deep: the idea of Code as poetry, as art, became a bit of an obsession with me.

If this review is vague and lacking in some specific details, it's mostly because I think other reviewers have discussed the plot and the characters -- book's been out for a while, after all -- and I think my contribution needs to be centered around my personal experience. For everything else, there's google.

I read this again today. And the critiques of it--from my early twenties--withered and died till only one of them was left.

This Alien Shore is one of the most beautiful implementations of starfairing humanity I've seen. The Guild is a hybrid of the Bene Gesserit and the Navigator's Guild of Dune, with politics and powerplays and complexity, but ultimately an entirely *ethical* worldview and objective. It's Dune without the soul-twisting. And the treatment of FTL...the anniq, the dragons...it will leave readers breathless. Without ever truly *talking* about it, the entire novel expresses and uplifts the hunger for starflight, the hunger to extend the threshold of our reach as individuals and as a species.

The plot has two threads--one follows a young girl, a repository of great and unknown secrets, on the run from Earth and its corporations. The other is Lucifer: a virus that is wrecking havoc on the Guild's navigators, threatening the foundations of mankind's salvation--FTL travel through the rifts of space that bind all the worlds together.

The computer/bioware aspects of this have many neuromancer-like components, but without the dystopian grit.

The characters are true--true to themselves, if not to our expectations of them--they are individuals, deeply meaningful, their lives and hopes and dreams and fears sketched out in vibrant 3D. Relationships-professional, romantic, adversarial-all are true to their function and form, and heartbreaking in some cases, liberating in others.

The complaints of my early-twenties were plot-related - that the pacing was off, certain scenes went on too long, others were not in the right places. This remains a mild criticism, tempered by the realization that back then I was young and impatient, and wanted to get to the "good bits". As a writer, I slowed down, appreciated the prose, the development, the subtle-but-necessary touches that made everything more. The one criticism that remains is that while the two plot-threads deepened and strengthened each others' themes, ultimately their intersection was not one of mutual resolution but of mutual understanding. That is...not a bad thing. But it doesn't bring the story full-circle in terms of action. The fear-and-threat felt so viscerally by the MC is not vindicated in a quite-satisfying way. Minus one star. But since this is getting graded on a 6-star scale, specially-made by me for the works that have influenced me so deeply, a full set of five stars remain.

This is a beautiful novel, full of hope for the future. Humanity's discarded children rise above the pettiness-of-soul that characterizes so much of mankind's history. Deeply flawed individuals display nobility of spirit, and the diverse, the mad, the broken, make their way to where they truly belong--the stars.

Read it. You'll be happy you did. And when you're done, perhaps you'll come to the same conclusion I did: We are all Variants, and Guera is our home.

Particularize Out Of Books This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)

Title	:	This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)
Author	:	C.S. Friedman
Book Format	:	Mass Market Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 564 pages
Published	:	July 1st 1999 by DAW (first published 1998)
Categories	:	Science Fiction. Fiction. Space. Space Opera

Rating Out Of Books This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)

Ratings: 4.04 From 3402 Users | 226 Reviews

Crit Out Of Books This Alien Shore (Alien Shores #1)

4.5 stars Originally posted at Fantasy Literature.This Alien Shore is another outstanding science fiction novel by an author who Ive come to respect immensely for her extraordinarily creative worlds, fascinating ideas, complex characters, and elegant prose. If theres one flaw (from my perspective) with Friedmans work, its a difficulty in actually liking many of her characters, but even if you find that its hard to sympathize with them, its also hard not to admire them, or at least to see them as

Notes: This review references ableism that the text engages with and Islamophobia that the text does not engage with. "Each human is, within himself, an alien landscape to all others." What an interesting read this was. This Alien Shore is a 1998 space-opera/cyberpunk/datapunk (is that a thing?) novel with an interest in human psychology and sociology, and I'm glad it was this month's SFFBC group read, because I don't know when I would have found out about it (or read it) otherwise. It's not a

Rating: 3.5 stars, rounded to 3We wear human bodies, but it takes drugs and software to make us truly human.Finally finished, after a month and a half! This is by no means a bad story -- its world-building and attention to detail is absorbing, and the Gueran culture with its kaja system is intriguing. Those features alone make this space-opera good enough for the rating given. Unfortunately, though I found myself interested whenever I picked up This Alien Shore, I found myself not caring enough

4.5 stars rounded up. It wasn't perfect but sure close. I am still not entirely sure how to survive the ainniq but I think that is the way the Guild wants it. So much to enjoy from the cyberpunk aspects to the exploring of other worlds to the reveals of Guild society. Friedman packed so much world building into this and still managed to create a compelling story. I felt for Jamisia as she tried to figure out what exactly she was, I liked the unwritten subtext that maybe we all have parts of

This Alien Shore is a standalone science fiction book. I'd read probably 25% before I suddenly realized I was reading a cyberpunk book and actually enjoying it. Its obviously cyberpunk from the beginning, really, its just that the tone is so different from most Ive read and I hadnt paused before then to try to categorize what I was reading. Some of the main characters are different from what I typically expect in cyberpunk, the politics and philosophies are also pretty different, and the

This Alien Shore delights with a detailed thought-out worldbuilding on a technical as well as a social level. Friedman created an intriguing scenario of the human evolution due to space travel. While humans on Earth try to eradicate all mental imbalances, humans on some of the abandoned colonies revel in different forms of neurodiversity and use face tattoos to give signals for correct interaction. A fascinating concept that convinced me.A large part of the story explores topics of cyberpunk, a

This is a mix of space opera and cyberpunk. While published in 1998, it has several quite prophetic notes on todays world. I read is as a part of monthly reading in January 2020 at SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group.It is described by another reviewer as a bastard child of Dune and Neuromancer. I have to add that it also has a great thriller action feel to it as well.It starts on Earth satellite, were a protagonist, Jamie, wakes up one morning to find out that someone is after her and she has to