I recently read some books by the writer Alastair Reynolds: three books from the “Revelation Space” series.
I guess you could call these books post-cyberpunk. They heavily feature currently trendy topics like genetic engineering, nanobots, selective manipulation of brain parts, copying consciousness into a computer, quantum uncertainty, and so on. It's entertaining in places. As for the technical and scientific part — I don't have the qualifications to judge how plausible it all is. The author is a physicist and astronomer, so let's hope he didn't screw up too much.
But when it comes to the plot, the characters' behavior, especially regarding these very "magic technologies" — I have major gripes. The biggest one — if the ultra-advanced tech described in the book actually comes to exist, people would behave completely differently, and not in the ordinary way they do now, and as they do in most of the book. Why is everything so slow and dumb for them if technology has reached such heights? Their motivations, again, are sometimes completely childish for the ubermenschen they are supposed to be. Why do the copied consciousnesses act so little, if they're relatively easy to make? You could copy a bunch of them and put them to work, and so on, see Greg Egan's books.
On the other hand, those who don't have implants and brain acceleration, conversely, look way too badass. How come Ilia Volyova tweaks everything so deftly and grasps complex concepts in a matter of days, when her learning and logic abilities should be perfectly ordinary?
An even bigger problem — very often the author skips entire chunks of justification and sense. For instance — why are the Ultras a single faction, and how can they act together if they are simply disconnected merchants? What do they trade, if most worlds have nanobots capable (or so it is believed, at least) of building absolutely anything?
And it's incredibly infuriating when they abuse Arthur C. Clarke's famous phrase "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". That might be so, but it doesn't mean you can arbitrarily introduce deus ex machinas into the narrative capable of doing whatever. I mean the neutron star supercomputer that can resurrect the dead, or the "god fuel" that you can't even analyze, yet its effect is better than medical nanobots. It's completely unconvincing.
David Brin got carried away with the same grotesque superpowers in his book "Heaven's Reach", but at least he was consciously writing a high-tech phantasmagoria . But Reynolds supposedly champions "plausibility", which I don't find in his books.
Another flaw - the plot isn't twisted enough in places. It drags on for too long, characters explain the same thing to each other, something the reader has already figured out ages ago. Sure, the characters don't know it yet, but the book is written for us, not for them. It also looks dumb when the protagonist always guesses correctly what's going on. It's understandable that it's hard for one person (the author) to map out the thoughts of different people, but you gotta at least try.
Overall, I'm left with the feeling that he's just an imitator of the grandmasters of modern sci-fi, exploiting trendy topics. By and large, the books are alright if you're a fan of the genre, but I wouldn't recommend them to anyone else. You have to understand here — compared to many sci-fi graphomaniacs, Reynolds actually writes pretty well. The second book, "Chasm City", seemed the best of the three to me.
P.S. Remembered a thing that drives me wildly crazy, just awful. If I understood everything correctly, the characters in the third book spend days on end under a load of more than 2G, up to 10.
This is absolutely unrealistic. Even a trained person can only withstand a few minutes at 6G, no tech will help them endure it for many days. Sure, reinforced muscles, heart, bones, and an exoskeleton on the outside would help, but not all crew members had that in the book. And anyway, they were walking around the ship and talking, not lying flattened out.