A near future science fiction novel and a mainstream character piece that isn’t a Frankenstein creation of thrown together parts(like one of the creepier characters) but an organic combining of the two styles where they work in complete compatibility. Fun thing with near future is we get to see what Macleod will get right (he already got one wrong, an aside about the U.S never having a Black president, oops), will classical music have a resurgence or do we face food born plagues(what a stretch),...

Song of Time is a melancholy reflection of life and legacy. Roushana Maitland is preparing to die, or more accurately shed her physical body and enter digital immortality. In the middle of her preparations, a young man with amnesia washes ashore on the cliffs below her house.The meat of the book is is Roushana reflecting on her life through the tumultuous 21st century, and the role of art in a world. A talented concert violinist, Roushana provides a frame to ask if art gives life meaning, and if...

I’m not quite sure what I felt about 'Song of Time'. It was beautifully written, and that meant I kept on reading well past the point where I realized the whole thing was only mildly interesting and quite unspectacular. Although things came together in the end, I never really felt that brought satisfaction.

“Life … is a series of acts which we eventually grow tired of performing.” Thrilled and disappointed simultaneously. Subtle future technology juxtaposition with timeless issues of living and dying. Literary post-apocalyptic science fiction. Unfortunately, self-consciously literary. Brilliant imagery, clumsy storytelling. Occasional homonym or similar faulty word choice. Several epigrams could become catch phrases for the culture were they not so ineptly worded. As if it was dashed off, but not r...

Not a bad book, but the author chose to use 1st person present tense, which never fails to drive me up the wall. Not terribly original as far as scifi goes, but reflective and interesting.

I haven't been posting much lately about books I've been reading, maybe because I haven't been all that impressed with them, which may say more about me and my choices (or my current glum mood) than it does about the books. But this novel is a gem, the life of a gifted woman written as if being narrated by an eloquent novelist or memoirist of the next century. Highly recommended.

This is elegant & lovely. A woman looking back on her life as she prepares to die, in a world very like ours could become. Speculative fiction with a mystery, a twist and compelling characters. A lot about music and art. This book won many awards.

They say the past is a foreign country where folks do things differently. The world constantly moves on, places change, affiliations fade, relationships end... and at some point in one's life social paradigms have shifted sufficiently that this becomes not so much an expression of bemused noncomprehension as a desire to go home. There is something of this pathos in Song of Time, Ian Macleod's Arthur C. Clarke Award winning novel. Roushana Maitland, world-renowned violinist is nearing the end of

an MacLeod is yet another innovative Brit to break in at the start of the twenty-first century. This novel made a very good first impression on me. The prose is stunning; this is easily one of the best-written novels I’ve read for this project. I’m just not sure that the story lives up to MacLeod’s crisp and elegant language.The novel is narrated by a British woman of part-Indian descent named Roushana Maitland. Most of it is a sort of memoir of her life through the twenty-first century, which t...

This was pretty crap really, the story weaved around and the final moment that she had killed her husband and didn't want to enter the cloud as an immortal didn't really make sense of the momentum of the rest of it. There was some good bit in it I admit but overall a bit disappointing - the visitor/robot was particularly non sensible

Hmm.Ian MacLeod’s Song of Time begins as Roushana Maitland, an aged concert violinist, finds an angelically beautiful young man washed up on the shore near her Cornish home. He has no memory of himself or his past, so Roushana calls him Adam, which becomes, in effect, his real name. She tells the young man stories from her life — memories of her childhood in Birmingham, of travelling to India with her mother to aid the victims of nuclear fallout, of her musical career in Paris. But there’s anoth...

A very well executed piece set in the near future. At the end of her life a woman looks back on her life as a musician, having lived through many of the defining moments of the 21st century. Although this is SF it has strong literary leanings and the characterisation is excellent, rich, sympathetic and three-dimensional.In many ways this needn't be set in the future, and as such is not really science fiction, except for the one issue it deals with sparingly but clearly throughout the book, that

What a strange, science-fiction world view of the future! There were many elements in this book which I enjoyed: the main characters were intriguing and well developed; the unfolding story line of the memories shared; and the premise of needing to consider your past in order to move toward the future. However, there were many things that I found irritating: the multiple typos; the rambling quality of the book (it needed a really good editor!); and the very dark world-view and what it portends wi...

Song of Time tells the life story of an elderly violinist who has lived through a turbulent century, through the memories she recounts to an amnesiac man she has rescued. The story worked extremely well on the large-scale level of the world’s slow collapse as well as on the small-scale, personal, emotional level of Roushana’s life. The mystery of the rescued man, Adam, ties into the ideas about identity and mortality that Roushana is exploring as she considers the end of her life, and whether sh...

This was a very emotional book. It takes place in the near future, which I guess is what makes it SciFi, but to me it's more of a piece of literature. The main character is forced to reevaluate her life because she needs to recall memories as she nears death. Read the book and that will make more sense. She helped by a stranger that washes up on the shore near her house. Classical music plays a major roll in the story, although you don't need to know anything about it. That aspect of the story i...

This is a wrenching and beautiful work about a woman reaching the end of her life in near-future Scotland. We learn of the adventures and loves and losses that constitute who she is as she shares her life’s story. Her audience is a seeming shipwreck-victim whom she discovers on the rocky shore near her home. She is recording her memories for the "crystal" in her brain, creating a digital copy of herself that will carry on past her impending death. Her life, like many, is a series of tragedies an...

Thoughtful and full of ideas, this near-future literary science fiction book pleased me in several ways. Thematically, it examines how life is lived and how remembered; how memories form and are used; how death might be approached; and of course, what love is. The background to all of this is a world with wonderful riches and culture, terrible poverty and violence, and a restless and dangerous earth. Music is the device that links it all together, as Roushana, the aged and dying protagonist, is

Really enjoyed this one. Reminded me a bit.

Don't read this book if you're not in the mood for re-evaluating your life. As Roushana Maitland looks back upon her hundred years on planet Earth, the reader can't help but do something very similar. It's a reflective, thoughtful and poetic book, but that doesn't stop it being upsetting and rather depressing!This didn't really need to be a science fiction novel, though the same could of course said for many works in the genre. The core of it - the very literary biography of a violinist - could

Not sure how I stumbled on this amazing "autobiography" of an elderly woman musician slowly dying in a disturbingly almost believable dystopian future. Absolutely loved it.