coalescent

I'm a Sydney-sider in Canada in winter for the first time, and I developed bronchitis five days ago. So take that into account. On the one hand I have the time to read while I rest, and I want to escape into an interesting story. On the other hand my body and my environment feel miserable. "Coalescent" by Stephen Baxter is my current science fiction read. I'm on page 360 of 470, but its sat unread for a whole week. It was a reluctant read the week before that. The chapters alternate with Regina, a girl in ancient Roman Britain from the fall of the Roman Empire about sixteen hundred years ago, and with her descendant, George, in the modern day. Baxter has lovingly filled in the details of ancient Roman Britain, and he gives an impressive vision of how modern and civilized the Roman Empire was, and how quickly the foundations of a civilised system can just go away. Regina goes from incident to incident as she grows up, including time with a historiaclly plausible King Arthur, all throw away history to justify the Society she secretly sets up to make sure her family survives the fall of civilisation. The chapters with the modern world were much less interesting, and in fact I was constantly annoyed by the formulaic manner in which the central character shows no interest at all in the alien artefact discovered in the outer regions of the solar system, unless forced to by outside events. I don't like George at all, he's a boring character. This is the first book in a series called "Destiny's Children", and I'm not sure I'll care enough to find out what his inevitable connection to the alien artefact will be. Its page 360 of 470, the Coalescents are a nice idea, but you have to *DO* something with them! Or else George and the others have to be interesting enough to draw me in so that I'm patient enough to plough through the next books and find out what on Earth the point of all this is. Sometimes, writers will conclude a story so brilliantly, that you change the way you see all the characters and events that you've experienced, and you feel the difficult journey was justified. Perhaps I'm being unfair to post something this early, but with the doom-laden words "Destiny's Children Book One" as the sub-title on the cover, I have little faith. OK, I finally read the last 110 pages, and Baxter does finally do something with the Coalescents. He takes you into the far future and shows you what the Coalescents are really about and where they're going. Its an interesting vignette, and then he zooms back to the present, which is boring again. He leaves the alien artefact as pointless, and I think he misses part of his own point of the self-pepetuation of large complex memetic systems with the way he ends the book with Peter and the Slan(t)ers. So he does redeem his central itheme of the Coalescents and use them, but it wasn't enough for me to want to go on and read the rest of the series. I found better escape while I was ill in the graphics novels "The Books of Magic" by Neil Gainman, which chronicle Timothy Hunter's initiation as a wizard, written more than a decade before Harry Potterism.