Reviews for The memory of fire

The average rating for The memory of fire based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-20 00:00:00 Carl Bradley About halfway through the book I started to wonder what the point of the story is. The narrative shifting back and forth was interesting, and the juxtaposition of the two locales is kind of cool, but ultimately it was a story without a purpose. At the very, very end there was a hint of why the events are important in this book's universe, but it came way too late for me to care. As much as I'd like to see if this story fits into a bigger picture with the other books in this universe, I really can't see myself trudging through another one like this.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-01 00:00:00 William Hodges This book is a decent enough, if a little tedious cyberpunk novel. The split narrative follows our heroine, Soledad, as a musician in the Central American anarchist cruce of Bamaca, and after its destruction, her new life as a refugee in the Oakland node, hanging out with much the same people. Foy has a gift for description, and there are some beautifully lyrical passages which balance out the slow plotting and passivity of the characters. But my problem with this book is a more a problem with the whole genre of second-wave cyberpunk, the stuff deliberately riffing off of Gibson that takes as axiomatic that Art is Politics, and that stories about anarchist poets and hackers and smugglers are Real and Authentic because their very existence shows how shallow the Plastic Virtual Lives of Those Corporate Slime are. It's what happens when an artistic movement starts believing its own propaganda, and ironically becomes mere style disconnected from any actual human experience. This isn't a bad book, but it's very much on the level of "so, you've read all of Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Cadigan, Shirley, Effinger, and you want another cyberpunk novel? This one has good sentences, why not?"