I recently read some books by Alastair Reynolds: three books from the "Revelation Space" series.
I guess you could call these books post-cyberpunk. They make heavy use of currently trendy topics like genetic engineering, nanobots, selectively influencing parts of the brain, uploading consciousness to a computer, quantum uncertainty, and so on. It's entertaining in places. As for the technical-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 "magic technologies" – I have major complaints. The biggest one is this: if the super-advanced technologies described in the book actually emerge, people will behave completely differently, not in the normal way they do now, and like they do in most of the book. Why is everything so slow and dumb 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 do so little when they are relatively easy to make? You could copy a whole bunch and put them to work, and so forth, see Greg Egan's books.
On the other hand, those without implants and brain acceleration look way too badass. How come Ilia Volyova is so slick at setting everything up and understanding complex things in a matter of days when her learning and logical abilities should be quite ordinary?
An even bigger problem – the author very often skips entire chunks of justification and sense. For example – why are the Ultras a unified faction, and how can they act together if they are just disconnected traders? What are they trading if most worlds have nanobots capable (or so it's believed) of building anything?
And it's incredibly annoying when they abuse Arthur C. Clarke's famous phrase "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That might be true, but it doesn't mean you can arbitrarily introduce deus ex machina capable of anything into the narrative. I mean a neutron star-supercomputer capable of resurrecting the dead, or "god fuel" which can't even be analyzed, yet the effect is better than medical nanobots. None of it is convincing at all.
David Brin got carried away with the same grotesque superpowers in the book "Heaven's Reach," but at least he was consciously writing a high-tech phantasmagoria . And Reynolds supposedly advocates for "plausibility," which I'm just not finding in his books.
Another flaw - the plot isn't twisted enough in places. It drags on too long, characters explain the same things to each other, things the reader figured out ages ago. Sure, the characters don't know it yet, but the book is written for us, not them. It also looks dumb when the protagonist always guesses correctly what's going on. Understandably, it's hard for one person (the author) to portray 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. The books are okay overall if you're a fan of the genre, but I wouldn't recommend them to anyone else. Keep in mind – compared to a lot of sci-fi graphomaniacs, Reynolds writes pretty decently. The second book, "Chasm City," seemed to me the best of the three.
P.S. Remembered a thing that drives me crazy, just terribly. If I understood everything correctly, in the third book the characters spend days on end under loads greater than 2G, up to 10.
This is absolutely unrealistic. Even a trained person can only withstand 6G for a few minutes; no tech is going to help them endure it for many days. Sure, reinforced muscles, hearts, bones, and an exoskeleton on the outside would help, but not all crew members in the book had that. And anyway, they were walking around the ship talking, not lying there flattened.