This is exactly what I needed after the disappointing Clan of the Cave Bear. Nancy Kress is an author whose ability to make me think never fails, even if I don't always enjoy her characterization. She doesn't just touch on or grapple with Big Ideas; she stalks them, lassos them, and puts them to work doing her bidding. And she is really, really smart. Wikipedia doesn't tell me what she specialized in during her formal education, so I'm not sure how much of the knowledge that shines through her s...

Academics in space, screwed over by the military they are unwittingly serving... that's a good start. One of the main characters is Iranian... I like that, I am really sick of everyone in the future being into Shakespeare or the ancient Greeks, nice to have a character who refers to great Persian poets. I felt like the culture of World, that is, the aliens that the anthropologists are studying, was a little thin on the ground. There must be more to life than headaches and flowers. There was also...

I had heard about this book through Nancy’s blog when she was discussing making up a new fundamental particle for a novel. It was in here, a particle that influences probability, called a probon. Also in here was an offshoot of humanity that had evolved in the presence of an ancient artifact that manipulated probability. The Worlders, people of the planet World, had developed something called Shared Reality, which meant that there was almost instant agreement on things between people once they s...

A tiny moon orbiting a distant planet turns out to be an artifact with inscrutable quantum properties that was manufactured by a very ancient and mysterious agent. The idea is interesting, the science and speculative science is rock solid and the characters are mostly appealing enough----though several die and one goes batshit crazy (but only to deliver long, tedious monologues). What made this a total failure for me was the writing, which consisted largely of too much explaining and rumination

Now that I think about it, I can't name any other science fiction novel by a woman author with such a hard science focus (though my knowledge is not exhaustive). Kress weaves together a story that relies upon sociology, quantum physics, neurochemistry, and in some parts geology. Unfortunately the subjects become tightly bound, and if you miss the expositive infodump on one topic, then you lose the thread of the novel.The alien society (of the Star-Trek-rubber-forehead variety, and Kress handwave...

Kress doesn't do a great job of establishing the science upon which her fiction is based, which makes some of the plot developments difficult to follow. Also, the characters lack any proper sense of inquiry, rendering them absolutely incredible. Apparently the characters are so used to discovering ancient alien technology they cannot understand that they've stopped wondering about the who's and why's of its creators; a feature I found quite odd and disruptive.

Well, if this novel doesn’t just open with one of the most awkward opening paragraphs ever. But that’s neither here nor there.Probability Moon – review attempt #1 #2 #3Through the space tunnels, humans had discovered thirty-six other sentient species, and thirty-five of them had been, in essence, human. They possessed only minor variations in skeletal structure, biochemistry, genome, and neurology. The prevailing theory was that something -- or some race -- had seeded the galaxy with a common ps...

My 2001 booklog says, Probability Moon (7-00), “Flowers of Aulit Prison” universe: "A", very nice. Definite reread sometime. [as of 5/27/20, I haven't.] “Flowers of Aulit Prison” won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1997. The story has been widely reprinted. Free audio version pf "Prison" at http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2009...I went on to read #2, which I thought was OK. #3, Probability Space, kinda falls apart. So, best to stop at #1?

It’s weird, considering how much scifi I read, that I don’t actually like aliens much. We get into someone’s made-up extra-terrestrial culture, I glaze over. And alien point-of-view chapters, oh man. Pretty close to a death knell. A lot of people use the same stupid author tricks on aliens that they do on minorities – ‘here are my aliens! They are all monolithically the same!’ ‘Here are my aliens! Their function is to make you review this book and say how it made you think deeply about humanity!...

This is the first in a series by Nancy Kress. I first came across her work when I read An Alien Light. I really enjoyed that book. I haven't read much of her other work but I picked this up because it sounded interesting and it seemed like it would be perfect for reading on the flights to and from India.As it turns out I didn't get to start it until I got home. I guess the trick to sleeping on airplanes is to bring enough reading material for 50 hours of travel time. I was so loaded up with book...

I really, really enjoyed this novel. World is an interesting place and the scientists sent from Earth do not understand the “Shared Reality” which governs society. Kress straddles soft SF and hard SF easily and satisfies both itches. I think that’s what I like so much about her SF. The narration is very well done and I was able to listen to it at 1.25x speed. It's probably just me, but I find it difficult to grok hard sf data dumps in audio format, especially when I'm driving! Luckily, Kress doe...

Very engaging book. I loved the social/cultural/religious aspects of the story along with the scientific explanations for the way things were. I also really like the idea of Humans stumbling upon a technology left by the mother race of humanoids that enabled interstellar travel , and how by using it, we also accidentally tipped off a race of hostile aliens to the tech which they were now using against us. The Worlders are a race of humanoids which despite being 99.995% genetically the same as Te...

3.5 stars -- Kress uses some pseudo-science around quantum-level neurotransmitter events to explain how the natives of an alien planet, called World, create a "shared reality". Additionally, she utilizes the ubiquitous sci-fi space tunnel to achieve deep space travel. While both stretch credulity, at least Kress goes for it, and this book turns out to be good fun. Plot events are split between the planet's surface, dealing with the Worlders and their strange flower-based society, and the orbitin...

Probability Moon is a a decent hard sci-fi book that didn't quite live up to its potential. Overall, it is an enjoyable book with a plot that keeps you reading and a pretty interesting alien culture. Unfortunately, it never quite makes the jump from okay/good to good/great. It's further hampered by a few important problems, one of which is the characters. The story is told through four narrators: two researchers, one ex-military officer, and one native. It would have been better told through thr...

This was really 2 stories loosely tied together.The more interesting, to me, is the story of man's exploration of a network of wormholes built by a long-gone alien race.In many systems, kin to homo sapiens populate habitable planets.There is an antagonistic alien race called the fallers who's aim is to repel human explorers back to their home system.Upon this back story is the main thread: explorers visit a planet called "World".The inhabitants have a sort of religion called "shared reality".The...

Nancy Kress. I am impressed and unimpressed at the same time. I knocked your audiobook out in a week which means something in itself. I would definitely give this a hard sci-fi label. Pretty complex/wild science/physics in this book.I'm tired so enjoy this rambling hot take...I didn't really care for the Worlders, the main alien race portrayed heavily in this book... if anything, I liked the Fallers aka the baddies warring against humanity in the story because we literally know nothing about the...

This is the first book in the Probability series. I must say I was disappointed in this one. It sounded good what with a race of humanoid people on a planet with an alien artifact in orbit disguised as a moon. Also an implacable alien foe bent on the total extermination of mankind. The humanoid people, who call themselves Worlders, have a "shared reality" that is supposed to be a moral compass for the entire population. War is unknown but lying, cheating, stealing and even killing are still know...

I barely remember this book, but my hazy recollection is that the writing wasn't that bad, and that I wanted to try another book by Kress. I also seem to remember a bicycle. You know, remembering stuff like this was why I joined Goodreads in the first place...

I didn't really enjoy the first half of this book. The close-to-human aliens have a culture that's just too, I don't know, clean. Sure, they might steal, and kill people who are not real. But their religion revolves around flowers! Plus, it was never clear to me (in this or the later two books of the series) what their shared reality actually felt like and how it worked. The characters were interesting, but none of them really pulled me in. And the obnoxious young human with his wrong-headed opi...

It's a weak four stars. Nancy Kress has pretensions...this is a decent attempt at hardish sci-fi. I appreciate that, even though it's awfully up and down. I deliberately avoided rating the book lower just because she has a horrifically, comically bad fictional geology for World (two words: pumice caves). I think there's both good and bad physics.The book has a small piece of what you might call classic Star Trek, 4X space computer game sci-fi (Earth vs. the Fallers) but mostly concentrates on th...