On the Steel Breeze tells a sweeping, epic tale that spans galaxies, focusing on three cloned aspects of Chiku Akinya (a third-generation space explorer from a famous family), each destined to affect human history in different yet important ways.
This second Poseidon's Children novel continues the story started in Blue Remembered Earth, with a much-evolved human populace heading to the stars in ark-like interstellar "holoships" made of human technology and spare asteroids. The artificial intelligence that Earth's population accesses via augmented brain interfaces (akin to a future Internet) has discovered evidence of alien technology on a world far out among the stars. It's this information that spurs humanity to send millions of people to the newly discovered planet, Crucible.
The version of Chiku sent on the holoship Zanzibar (a delightful nod to the seminal sci-fi classic by John Brunner) discovers conspiracies within other half-truths imparted by the AI system named Arachne, while the Chiku who remains on Earth discovers similar falsehoods when she forges an alliance with the post-human merfolk living in Earth's oceans.
There are even more alien artifacts than originally reported by the AI, including some incomprehensibly powerful spaceships, waiting for one of the three Chiku clones on Crucible, as well as a splinter personality of the original Arachne.
On the Steel Breeze's plot threads are carefully, complexly woven together from the first page through the final satisfying epilogue. Reynolds continues to display his mastery of both hard physical and biological speculative fiction while deftly drawing truly flawed heroic characters across many years and a vast expanse of space. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor