Gollancz, 2012, 506 p.

Global warming and sea level rises have altered the political landscape of Earth drastically. Africa is bounded by walls to keep out the sea and has become a global power house. People in this future have internal augmentation for long distance information and communication. Very few environments are beyond the reach of this Surveilled World, run by the Mechanism, which by overseeing everyone’s implanted augmentation prevents crimes occurring. Brother and sister Geoffrey and Sunday Akinya are two of the grandchildren of Eunice, the founder of the prominent industrial company Akinya Space, but are detached from this family enterprise; cousins Hector and Lucas are very much involved in its running.

Geoffrey is using aug to study elephants in the Amboseli region of Africa, Sunday is an artist in the Descrutinised Zone, an area of the Moon where, for privacy reasons, the Mechanism doesn’t operate. When Eunice dies both Geoffrey and Sunday are drawn into a search for something she may have left behind which Hector and Lucas fear may impact badly on the company’s fortunes.

The action roams from the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro to the Moon, under the Indian Ocean in the realm of the United Aquatic Nations, on to Phobos, then Mars, out to the Kuiper Belt and back. An array of instruments known as the Ocular, spanning vast areas of the Oort Cloud, has allowed imaging of extraterrestrial planets at high resolution and detection of a structure known as the Mandala on Sixty-one Virginis-f.

In this vision of a future where humanity is scattered over the Solar System Blue Remembered Earth is reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312. That novel, though, was to a large extent plotless, and its hero was really the Solar System. Blue Remembered Earth’s plot is intricately and cleverly meshed – like whatever passes for clockwork these digital days. And therein lies a problem. The characters are drawn all over the system by the plot’s exigencies. It is over-engineered, with complications that inspire “hold on a minute” moments. Its heroine is in effect Eunice, and she never makes an appearance except by way of machines imprinted with versions of her personality.

It’s still good SF though.

Pedant’s corner: overlaying for overlying. There was also a scene set on Mars where an abandoned Russian site on Mars had a faded hammer and sickle flag and Reynolds also mentions a former Soviet submarine. Is he still lost somewhere in the Cold War?

Not a very catchy headline, is it?

Yet this is exactly what has happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan – an event which has now apparently overshadowed the many thousands of deaths from the tsunami which followed the earthquake; a tragedy of enormous scale, very difficult to get your head round, and virtually unbloggable.

Yes, it was stupid to site the plant by the sea-shore in a quake-prone region subject to tsunami inundation. Yes, there should have been thought put to the likelihood of a tsunami stopping the cooling system’s pumps from working. Yes, there should have been back-up cooling systems in place.

But…

No-one has died yet.

Of course any unnecesssary deaths are to be deplored but any deaths will be microscopic in number compared to the natural disaster.

And there are deaths associated with the extraction of coal and oil/gas for burning to make electricity. Even hydro-electricity has its drawbacks.

There are catches to alternative power generation methods too.

No power generation technology will be free of them.

It’s a question of risk, and nuclear generation has quite small ones really. (The waste is a different issue.)

I wouldn’t want a nuclear power plant in my backyard, though.

What’s that? Torness is only a relatively few miles away (as the wind blows) on the Berwickshire coast?

Hmm. So it is.

But then I grew up between Glasgow and Faslane; two prime targets in the event of the Cold War becoming hot, with a third – Holy Loch – not much further away, and barely gave it a thought.

Mind you, thermonuclear immolation would be a damn sight quicker than radiation poisoning.