Polystom

This week, I ‘ave been mostly readin’ Polystom, by Adam Roberts. Yes, I know it was published about five years ago, but I picked it up in the local library to read in a Telford hotel.

The quality of Roberts’ writing is good. I say this because pretty much nothing happens for the first two thirds of the book, and I still carried on reading. The focus up until the final section is on the world and culture Roberts has created, and the plot crawls together slowly, in the background, until the last ten pages or so, when all is revealed.

The setting itself is intriguing, and posits a much smaller solar system, filled with breathable air, so that intrepid aeronauts can fly from planet to planet in biplanes. A culture reminiscent of ancient Greece has settled the various worlds, and has a technology roughly equivalent to that of Europe at the time of the First World War.

Roberts does a good job of evoking the casual disregard of the culture’s autocrats for their servants, making me wonder if I would treat them so harshly, had I grown up accustomed to being waited on.