By Iain M. Banks

Hardcover: 640 pages
Publisher: Orbit
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0316123402

Plot Summary:

Lededje Y’breq is an Intagliated, a person engineered to naturally develop complex and beautiful tattoos over and within her entire body. Perversely, such decoration is a sign of shame within Lededje’s culture, a mark of a family debt that could not be repaid. Lededje is little more than an ornament, in theory a precious and protected position, in practice little more than a slave to the wealthy tycoon who betrayed her father before she was born and had her turned into an Intagliated to commemorate the event. She is killed while attempting to escape her master one time too many. But when the Culture gets involved, death is only the beginning.

Prin is a Pavulean, a member of a non-human, somewhat elephant-like species, and he is in Hell. It is a place of unending and horrific torment, where vast numbers of Pavuleans are tortured in infinitely inventive ways for what looks to be all eternity. That Hell is a virtual construct deliberately created by Pavulean civilization itself only makes things worse.

Determined to expose the truth of Hell and force his people to confront it, Prin manages to escape to tell his tale, but must leave his mate behind to do it.

Joiler Veppers is Lededje’s former master. As arrogant as he is wealthy, he seeks only more wealth and power. And if he has to inject himself into the War in Heaven to get it, he will.

Vatueil is a solder of the War in Heaven. Living and dying in world after world, he fights for the destruction of the various virtual Hells. Started as a result of the conflict between those civilizations that create virtual Hells and those who seek to eliminate the practice, by mutual agreement, the War has been fought entirely within the virtuality. Until now.

OA Relevance: Moderate to high

Banks’ Culture shares a number of similarities with the OA setting, including superhuman AI and advanced biotechnologies although it is slightly less hard science oriented. Most of Banks’ stories could take place in the OA universe with minimal tweaking.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Banks is a talented writer who has grown in his craft over time, and Surface Detail finds him at the peak of his game. I found it engaging and detailed, with well-drawn characters while also having a plot that moved along at a satisfying pace.

Overall Rating: Very Good

A solid example of the space opera genre that is both engaging and interesting, and which manages to tackle venerable themes in ways that make it all feel fresh and new. Recommended.

More about the author, Todd Drashner, here.

By Neal Asher

Paperback: 512 pages
Publisher: Tor
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0230750371

Plot Summary:

In The Technician, we return again to Asher’s Polity Universe, this time to a period about twenty years after the destruction of the Theocracy on the world of Masada (this destruction being described in detail in Asher’s earlier book The Line of Polity, reviewed here some time back).

Masada is a world in flux, the old, harsh, and very dangerous world that existed under the Theocracy being steadily worn away and tamed by an ongoing infusion of Polity technology and social principles. This process has been complicated somewhat both by the contamination of the planet with alien Jain technology (the Jain are extinct ancient aliens whose remnant artifacts are both very powerful and very dangerous) and the discovery around the same time that Masada is the former homeworld of another long gone alien race, the Atheter (also detailed in The Line of Polity).

Further complicating matters is the Tidy Squad, a group of holdover rebels from the days of Theocracy rule who seek out still surviving members of Theocracy society and terminate them with extreme prejudice. High on their hit list is Jeremiah Tombs, a former proctor/soldier in the Theocracy hierarchy who was nearly killed in an encounter with a Hooder, easily the deadliest of all the Masadan predator species.

Tombs has been held by the Polity in a secure location since shortly after the fall of the Theocracy, spending most of this time in a fugue-like state that includes refusing to believe that the Theocracy has fallen or that some two decades have passed since this occurrence. The reason for the Polity’s great interest in him is twofold: First, he is virtually the only individual to ever survive a Hooder attack, second it seems that Hooders may actually be some sort of ancient war machines built by the Atheter, and third when this particular Hooder attacked Tombs it apparently put something into him while it was taking a lot of stuff out. In an attempt to find out exactly that that something might be, the Polity AIs decide to release Tombs into the wider world, apparently alone but actually with secret protection. When the Tidy Squad becomes aware of this and sets out to eliminate Tombs, things start to get interesting.

As a final ingredient, throw in an ancient alien something that appears unexpectedly at the edge of Polity space and then makes a beeline for Masada and you have the makings of a major story climax.

OA Relevance: Moderate to high

Asher’s Polity universe shares a number of similarities with the OA setting, including superhuman AI and advanced biotechnologies although it is less hard science oriented. Most of Asher’s stories could take place in the OA universe with minor to moderate tweaking.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Asher is a talented writer who has grown in his craft over time and The Technician reflects this. I found it engaging and detailed, with well-drawn characters while also having a plot that moved along at a satisfying pace.

About the only thing I could find to complain (mildly) about is that for all their superhuman abilities, Asher’s AIs sometimes seem to be depicted as rather less capable than their abilities would seem to imply, usually so as to allow the human characters (both good guys and bad) to be able to play some role in the story. Even in this regard, Asher handles this issue better, and with a defter touch, than he has in earlier works.

Overall Rating: Very Good

A solid example of the space opera genre that is both engaging and interesting, and which manages to tackle venerable themes in ways that make it all feel fresh and new. Recommended.

More about the reviewer, Todd Drashner, here.

Publisher: Tor Books

Language: English

ISBN: 978-0765319647
Plot Summary:
It’s late in the 21st century and humanity seems to be teetering on the edge of the Singularity. Or maybe the Singularity has already happened. Or maybe it hasn’t and never will. No one seems to quite know for sure.
Vast numbers of people lock themselves away into fortified crèches, their bodies maintained by automated machinery while they live out their lives in virtual reality fantasies. Others have themselves modified to increase their intelligence or other mental abilities, usually with various inconvenient or unpleasant side effects. Vampires have been discovered in the ancestral genome and resurrected (they had superhuman intelligence, but were also few and far between, and right angles drive them into epileptic fits. When humanity started building with straight lines it was pretty much the end of them). And one day millions of unidentified objects appear out of deep space around the Earth, apparently take a picture of everything on the planet down to a resolution of about one meter, and then burn up in the atmosphere.

In the shocked aftermath of this event, a signal is discovered to have been sent from the objects out to a point in deep space and the Theseus expedition is born. An AI ship, a crew of modified humans, and a single vampire are sent out aboard an experimental spacecraft to try and determine what is going on. What they find is enigmatically alien, very disturbing, and very, very dangerous. Whether more or less so than the crew themselves and the civilization they come from is an open question that may nag the reader right up to the end of the book.

OA Relevance: Moderate to high
While not completely akin to the OA future, much of what is described in the book might be similar to that found in the early to mid Interplanetary Age in OA. Augmentations without the bugs all worked out, social stresses brought on by new technology, and the complexities of interpersonal relationships when the participants may practically (or literally) be different species are all examined here and definitely resonate when considering the early OA timeline.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Watts is definitely writing a hard SF novel here, complete with references and an appendix going into the scientific details at the end of the book. Some of the concepts explored here are downright mind-blowing, particularly when he starts getting into just how buggy the human perception of “reality” really is. I finished the book both impressed and depressed at the same time. Also wondering how some of the weirder scientific facts the story plays with might be translated into the OA universe.
That all said, this is very much a psychological thriller type book, with a heavy focus on the mental states and mental baggage of the characters. The science and technology aren’t entirely secondary, but definitely don’t usually play more than a supporting role. Depending on your preferences, this may either thrill you or bore you. I occasionally found the introspection dragging on a little long, but overall the book does a good job of grabbing and holding the reader’s attention.

Overall Rating: Very Good
Definitely a book that will make you think. If you think that there’s nothing really new under the SF sun, Blindsight will probably make you change your mind. Well and fully developed characters combined with mind stretching science in areas that most SF never thinks to explore. Highly recommended.

More about the reviewer, Todd Drashner, here.

House of Suns

By Alastair Reynolds

Hardcover: 473 pages
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-57507-7-171

Plot Summary:

Some six million years in the future, humanity has expanded to fill the galaxy and has diversified in myriad directions. Humans and human derived beings occupy millions of worlds. Gengineered beings swim in alien seas, or enclose stars in dyson swarms, or convert themselves into post-human entities of super-human intelligence. Alien Priors occupied the galaxy billions of years ago, but are long gone now, their artifacts remaining as examples of technology humanity cannot match. More disturbingly, some millions of years earlier the entire Andromeda galaxy vanished for no apparent reason, although hypothetical Andromeda Priors are suspected. The Machine People, a civilization of AI intelligences, are humanity’s only companions in the entire Milky Way.

Civilizations rise, build empires of interplanetary or interstellar scope, and then eventually fall. All except for the Lines.

Created at the start of humanity’s jump to the stars, each Line consists of a thousand or so clones, or shatterlings, of a single individual (gengineered so half are male and half female), each containing a copy of their progenitor’s mind and memories. Each was equipped with a starship and each set off into space to explore, learn, and eventually rendezvous with their clone siblings at some far distant place and time to share memories before heading out again. Now, millions of years later, Campion and Purslane, shatterlings of Gentian Line, also known as the House of Flowers, are travelling together on their way to the 32nd meeting of the Line and things are not going well.

For various reasons, both will be late to the meeting. Not just a little late, but decades late. Which is simply not done. Even worse, in their time traveling together, Purslane and Campion have fallen in love and falsified their memory records to hide that fact. Which counts as an unforgivable crime if they are caught at it.

Hoping to distract the Line from their failings, the two shatterlings are bringing a member of the Machine People, rescued during their journey to the rendezvous, to the meeting. With luck, the presence of such an honored guest will put the rest of the Line in a forgiving mood and prevent them from examining the memory records too closely.

All these worries are suddenly reduced to insignificance when a distress signal washes over their ships as they approach the rendezvous system. Gentian Line is under attack, the entire solar system nearly destroyed in the process. Most of the Line is dead and the survivors are fleeing to the secret fallback location.

Joining the remaining survivors, trying to determine why the Line was attacked, Purslane and Campion find themselves in a web of intrigue, murder, betrayal, and ancient secrets, all of them growing out of a single enigmatic name: The House of Suns.

OA Relevance: Moderate

While House of Suns is fairly hard science and certainly describes a future similar to that depicted in OA, the far future timescale and technology dilutes this just a bit.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Reynolds does his usual excellent job of writing in House of Suns. The characters are solid and three-dimensional, the story is compelling, and the ending hints at vistas of literally cosmic size. About the only issue I could find with the book is the occasional bit where things seemed to drag just a little bit, which is perhaps understandable in a story where millennia go by in a few pages due to near light-speed travel or stasis technology. That said, there were one or two sections that could have been a bit shorter without a loss of quality or interest in the story.

Overall Rating: Very Good

Although less hard in its science than the Revelation Space series, the strong writing and epic storyline in House of Suns makes for a fascinating read. Recommended.

More about the reviewer, Todd Drashner, here.

By Walter Jon Williams

Hardcover: 265 pages
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-59780-125-6

Plot Summary:

In the pretechnological universe of Midgarth, the swordsman Aristide and his talking cat Bitsy are traveling across the desert when they encounter a group of caravan guards. From the group’s leader, a troll, he learns that a band of particularly vicious marauders has caused a pile up at the local oasis since less well armed groups have been disappearing and everyone is afraid to move until they either build up their forces or the caliph’s army shows up to protect them. Curious, Aristide continues to the oasis and in short order organizes things sufficiently to get all the various caravans together to attempt to make the crossing to the coast and safety. The resulting adventure ends with the marauders being destroyed, disturbing intelligence being gathered, and Aristide taking off as fast as he can for the Womb of the World, the gate that leads out of the universe and into the places beyond.

Cut to…the very technological Myriad City in the universe of Topaz where Aristide is meeting with friend and former companion Daljit and discussing what he discovered during his time in Midgarth. And now we begin to learn what is really going on.

The time is over a thousand years hence, and humanity has come a long way. The solar system has been reengineered, nanotechnology has been mastered (bringing, among things, immortality, resurrection from backup, and Xeroxing of people on demand), colonies are established around the nearby stars, and vast artificial AI platforms arranged in a “Matrioshka array” around the sun generate wormholes linking to artificial universes that can be customized to various useful (or at least whimsical) purposes. And the man who made all this possible, Pablo Monagas Perez, is nearly a thousand years old and has recently taken to calling himself Aristide…

What follows is a grand romp through conspiracies, war, revelations about the nature of the universe, and a cautionary tale about ones past really coming back to haunt you.

OA Relevance: Moderate to High

Although the technology and society depicted here share many similarities with OA, there are sufficient differences (particularly in humanity’s relationship with its AIs) that the match is not as broad as one might think.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

This is a fun, well written story and I greatly enjoyed reading it. Williams creates a likable, fairly well fleshed out main character and a complex and interesting future. Reading the story I found myself wanting to know more about the future world he depicts. That said, the focus of this story is all on Aristide and the development of the other characters in the story suffers somewhat for that.

Overall Rating: Very Good

Overall this is an interesting, imaginative, and rich story filled with neat ideas and great imagery. While the average OA reader won’t find anything shockingly new here, there is a nice spread of neat concepts and the view is from a somewhat different direction than what we normally depict here. Buy it.

More about the reviewer, Todd Drashner, here.

The Prefect

By Alastair Reynolds

Hardcover: 410 pages
Publisher: Ace Books/Penguin Group USA
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-441-01591-7

Plot Summary:

Alastair Reynolds takes us once again to his Revelation Space universe, this time to tell a story of human civilization at its height, but with premonitions of a coming fall.

This time Reynolds takes us to the Glitter Band, a vast swirl of habitats orbiting the world of Yellowstone. A hundred million people call the 10,000 habitats of the Band home and live under the principles of the Demarchy, a super democratic society in which instant polling and online voting gives everyone the ability to provide input on virtually every societal decision that needs to be made and that they care to pay attention to (and in Demarchist society, voter apathy is anathema to nearly all).

Panoply is the law enforcement agency of the Glitter Band, charged both with making sure that everyone’s voting rights are preserved, that no one cheats (voter fraud is considered only slightly less odious than murder), and with maintaining a sort of loose cross-habitat law and order force for those times when individual habitat security fails. They are hampered in their task by the general distrust that most of the citizens of the Band have for authority or governmental organizations in general.

Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a sort of detective and general officer of the law in Panoply. It is through his eyes that most of the story is told.

Dreyfus is assigned to investigate a horrible event, the destruction of an outlying habitat in the Band and the death of its 900 inhabitants. Initial investigations seem to point to the Ultra’s, the cyborg humans whose near monopoly on interstellar travel makes them both vital to and not very popular with system bound humanity. A major interstellar diplomatic dust-up seems in the offing, but as things develop Dreyfus comes to believe that something far more sinister is going on. Another player is operating in the Glitter Band and before everything is done Dreyfus and Panoply will face betrayal, attack, the destruction of Yellowstone’s civilization, and intimations of a future far darker than the brilliance of the Glitter Band present would seem to allow.

OA Relevance: Very High

Reynolds Revelation Space universe is already credited as a major inspiration for OA and this book easily takes its place in that company. Yellowstone and the Glitter Band could easily be a world in the OA universe with only minor modifications. The Demarchist civilization that Reynolds describes is so well described as to seem both weird and believable at the same time. And the technology of Glitter Band civilization, in particular the nanotech “quickmatter” that forms the basis for most systems, machines, and general life is likely to fire the imagination of nearly any OA worldbuilder.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Reynolds does a phenomenal job throughout pretty much all of the book. However, I did find myself wondering a little bit about the apparent lack of monitoring and communication within the Glitter Band itself. For all that the Band is a single civilization, there seemed at times to be very little communication among its many habitats even though such communication is implied and mentioned in various places. A major example is that an entire habitat can be destroyed with no one appearing to initially notice or that it seems possible to move among the elements of the Band almost unnoticed if one wants to. Given how heavily even our comparatively primitive civilization is able to monitor its airspace, it seemed at times a bit of stretch that this sort of thing could go on in the Band. That said, this is a quibble I didn’t really notice until thinking about the story afterward. And it is something easily ignored in the heat of the story.

The only other issue I found with this story is that it is a prequel to Reynold’s earlier books. As such I read it already knowing some of what was to happen in the Glitter Bands future which added a bit of melancholy.

Overall Rating: Excellent

If you are already familiar with Reynolds and the Revelation Space universe, you’ll love this latest addition. If you’re not, this will make a phenomenal introduction.

*****

More about the reviewer, Todd Drasher, here.

Ursula K Le Guin

University of California Press
February 2001
ISBN: 0-520-22735-2

It’s easy to see the “OA relevance” of the works of Iain Banks, or Alastair Reynolds. These are authors who were fundamental inspirations for us. Similarly, one can read works by Neal Asher, and read stories which explore many of the same concerns we explore in our writings.

There are, however, short stories, novels, and game settings which don’t immediately appear to have much for the afictionado of transhumanist SF — but, on closer examination, turn out to have interesting ideas to mull over.

I think of these as “unexpected voices”. From time to time, we’ll bring some of them to your attention.

Our first unexpected voice comes from Ursula K Le Guin. Always Coming Home is considered, by many, to be one of her finest works. It is a book in which her talents were given free reign; it is often spoken of as being her finest worldbuilding effort to date. But at first glance, it hardly seems related to our subgenre at all:

Much of the book is concerned with explaining the culture, lands and world of a fictional people called the Kesh. They live in a mediterranean-climate river valley in northern California. The world is one of the far future, some thousands of years from now, in which natural and man-made disasters have devastated human civilzation as we understand it. People are now rural and parochial, the old industrial era now no more than legend and bad memory.

The detail of the setting is astounding. The songs, art, technology, beliefs, rituals etc. of the Kesh are all treated with. Their culture is based around a metaphorical conception of the world, which is far too complex to explain here (read, and re-read, the book). It takes a while to understand the Kesh as their society is so unlike our industrial capitalist one. They do have a strong Native American flavour, but think Iroquois rather than Apache.

The novel itself, which is actually just the longest of a number of stories, serves to illustrate the setting by way of the learning of the central character and the contrast with a very different culture in the Kesh’s world.

A far future setting, but postapocalyptic, agrarian, “parochial”. A fine exercise in sustained worldbuilding, by all accounts, but it hardly seems the stuff of OA. So why do I offer this book, describing a human culture which is unabashedly low-tech, have an unexpected transhumanist voice? It’s not so much the Kesh, but one of their neighbors:

Some eleven thousand sites all over the planet were occupied by independent, self-contained, self-regulating communities of cybernetic devices or beings — computers with mechanical extensions. This network of intercommunicating centers formed a single entity, the City of Mind.

Yaivkach meant both the sites or centers and the whole network or entity. Most of the sites were small, less than an acre, but several huge desert Cities served as experimental stations and manufacturing centers or contained accelerators, launching pads, and so on. All City facilities were underground and domed, to obviate damage to or from the local environment. It appears that an ever-increasing number were located on other planets or bodies of the solar system, in satellites, or in probes voyaging in deep space.

The business of the City of Mind was, apparently, the business of any species or individual: to go on existing.

Its existence consisted essentially in information.

Its observable activity was entirely related to the collection, storage, and collation of data, including the historical records of cybernetic and human populations back as far as material was available from documentary or archaeological evidence; description and history of all life forms on the planet, ancient and current; physical description of the material world on all levels from the subatomic through the chemical, geological, biological, atmospheric, astronomical, and cosmic, in the historical, current, and predictive modes; pure mathematics; mathematical description and prediction derived from data in statistical form; exploration and mapping of the interior of the planet, the depths and superfices of the continents and seas, other bodies in the solar system including the sun, and an expanding area of near interstellar space, research and development of technologies ancillary to the collection, storage, and interpretation of data; and the improvement and continuous enhancement of the facilities and capacities of the network as a whole — in other words, conscious, self-directed evolution. …

Evidently it was in the interest of the City to maintain and foster the diversity of forms and modes of existence which made up the substance of the information which informed their existence — I apologise for the tautology but find it inevitable under the circumstances. Everything was grist to the Mind’s mill; therefore they destroyed nothing. Neither did they foster anything. They seem not to have interfered in any way with any other species. …

The City had no relation to plant life at all, except as it was the subject of their observation, a source of data. Their relation to the animal world was similarly restricted. Their relation to the human species was similarly restricted, with one exception: communication, the two-way exchange of information. …

Computer terminals, each linked to nearby ground or satellite Cities and hence to the entire vast network, were located in human communities worldwide. Any settled group of fifty or more people qualified for an Exchange, which was installed at the request of the human community by City robots, and maintained by both robot and human inspection and repair…

Now that could almost be an Encyclopedia Galactica entry, couldn’t it?

There is very little overt interaction with the City of Mind in Always Coming Home. But it is an interesting exercise to reread this work and contemplate what manner of observers, drones, subtle machines might well be sprinkled throughout the lands of the Kesh. How would they ever know, if the City didn’t tell them?

Always Coming Home offers the careful reader a chance to contemplate how the interaction between a post Singularity culture and a “reservation” might look. As such, it might well offer inspiration for authors who are contemplating similar interactions, between high S>>1 entities and lower tech polities. I also note that the lavish, careful attention to detail in this work make it a model of consistent worldbuilding.

The book itself is constructed almost like an anthropologist’s case study, a collage of observations, stories, essays, and sketches. As such, it’s not a particularly easy read; not likely to be tossed off in one session. But if one has bits of time, here and there, this “unexpected voice” has a great deal going for it.

More about the reviewer, Bill Ernoehazy, here.

By Iain M. Banks

Hardcover: 593 pages
Publisher: Orbit/Hachette Book Group USA
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-316-00536-4

Plot Summary:

A very long time ago an alien race known as the Involucra (or sometimes the Veil) created over two thousand great devices spaced evenly around the galaxy. Each device was apparently intended to operate as some form of shield generator when fully completed, with the combined network of devices creating a barrier that would enclose the galaxy. Why the Involucra wanted to do this, whether or not they were ever successful, or what ultimately happened to them (they disappeared long ago, you see) is all lost to history. So are most of the great devices, eventually known as Shellworlds due to their multi-level nature. Time, history, and deliberate action by an ancient enemy (itself also long vanished) has reduced the number of such constructs in the galaxy by about half, while galactic drift has long ago shifted them far from their original positions. But the shellworlds themselves are far from dead.

Over millions of years, various races have figured out how to locate and modify derelict shellworlds, turning them into multi-level habitat megastructures able to support a host of internal environments and sometimes a host of different races. In the current era, one race that is particularly good at this sort of thing is the Oct, who not only modified the shellworld of Sursamen to make it habitable to various races, but also brought humans there to live on two of the constructs sixteen levels. The Oct are a prideful species, forever claiming that they are the inheritors of the Involucra’s legacy (whatever that might be). The rest of the galaxy, for its part, largely takes this sort of posturing with an indulgent keg of salt and goes on about its business. The Oct are really rather small potatoes, you see. Certainly, they are good at opening up shellworlds, but they are not yet in the same league as even the mid-level Involved species such as their patrons, the Nariscene, let alone the great powers of the galaxy such as the Morthenveld (mentors to the Nariscene) , or the Culture. And thus our story begins.

The great king, Hausk, has spent his life conquering the Eighth level of the world (which he and his people live upon) and is on the verge of conquering the Ninth when he is grievously wounded in battle. A grievous wound becomes a fatal one when his long time friend and most trusted advisor, Mertis tyl Loesp turns out to be a betrayer and the leader of a plot to overthrow the king and take over the kingdom. Tyl Loesp plans to first rule in the guise of Regent to the king’s youngest son, Oramen, although it is clear from the beginning that the young prince won’t live to actually take the throne.

However, unknown to tyl Loesp and the other traitors, the regicide and discussion of the plot to kill Oramen is all witnessed by the king’s rather foppish second son, Ferbin who is hiding in the building where the killing and plot explanation is carried out (Ferbin is not really a military type you see (that was to be his late older brothers role), and when a near miss killed his retinue and spooked his mount into running away he was quite content to take some time to hide and gather his wits about him again).

Outraged by the killing of his father and betrayal of his family, Ferbin vows vengeance. At the same time he has no illusions about his chances against the conspirators if he goes up against them alone. In desperation he decides to try to reach his sister, Djan, who lives in the alien empire known as the Culture. Acquiring the services of a loyal (but by no means subservient) retainer, Ferbin sets off for the surface of Sursamen and the galaxy beyond to find his long lost sister.

Next, we learn of Oramen, the youngest of King Hausk’s sons. Never intended to ascend the throne, Oramen is very much a bookworm and quiet intellectual type. Nevertheless he knows his duty to lineage and country and sets out to do the best he can to be first Prince Regent and then King, assisted of course by his family’s loyal friend and advisor, Mertis tyl Loesp. He wonders briefly if there is any way to get word of their family’s great tragedy to his long lost sister, Djan.

Jump now to the life of Djan Seriy Anaplian, who has lived in the Culture since she was a young girl. Sent out into the Culture and the wider galaxy by her royal father, who had no use for a female child, she has thrived within Culture society and risen to become a member of Special Circumstances, the Culture’s covert operations and general dirty tricks division. Working with a drone partner, Djan seeks to gradually manipulate the development of various primitive cultures until they can be brought up to a civilized standard of technology and behavior. The job is challenging, complicated, and sometimes dangerous, and Djan loves it. She is therefore in something of an ambiguous position when she learns that her father, the king of the Eighth level of Sursamen, has died in battle along with one of her brothers. She has not seen her family in years and never really expected to ever see them again. Nevertheless she sets out to return to Sursamen to pay her respects. And now the story gets interesting.

OA Relevance: Moderate

The complexity and sheer scale of the story fit well within the OA ethos. At the same time, much of the story has to do with alien races or semi-medieval court intrigue, neither of which may seem to have direct relevance to the OA universe. The humans of Sursamen might be characterized as low tech by almost any standard, yet they know about the nature of their world, alien races, and the general nature of the galaxy at large. The alien civilizations that are mainly dealt with (the Culture really plays something of a bit part here) are very old and vastly powerful and the megastructures described might be the envy of even the Mutual Progress Association. But a direct connection to OA is hard to find. I felt more of a sense of Brin’s Uplift Universe with its great age and older races mentoring younger ones. Although, Bank’s treatment stands all on its own.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

In his more recent Culture novels, Banks seems to be exploring different aspects of his fictional universe, and Matter is no exception. This time we are seeing something of the galaxy beyond the Culture, both the other advanced civilizations which the Culture interacts with (a sub-sub plot is that relations between the Culture and the Morthenveld are at a rather delicate juncture) and some lower tech cultures that have a very different relationship with galactic civilization than anything Banks has described before.

One thing that really stands out with this work is its sheer complexity. Banks has at least three, and sometimes as many as five, plots going at once throughout the book and while he keeps masterful control over them all, the reader is going to have to stay on their toes for the duration to keep track of everything that is going on. Speaking of complexity, in an earlier review of Banks book The Algebraist I had made the complaint that it felt like the book sometimes lost control of its own complexity and simply buried itself in info-dumps and detail. Something of that same level of detail pops up here, but this time the control never wavers. Banks is taking us to a very definite place and every bit of information he drops is going to end up having relevance before the story is over. However, if your memory for detail is not the best, you may want to take notes.

Perhaps the only complaint I could make about the book was that the ending, while it makes perfect sense, was not entirely satisfying. Not badly done, just somewhat off-putting in comparison to most story endings and the way that most of the Culture novels wrap things up all nice and neat by the last page. That doesn’t happen here and I was left with a small sense of “Hey! Wait a minute! You have to tell me how it all ends!” Banks does actually, just not in the way we are used to. Oh, and you really, really need to read to the very last page to get everything out of the story.

Overall Rating: Excellent

If you want to see a whole other facet of the Culture universe, you want to buy this book. Just don’t expect anything quite like what you’ve read in the Culture series before.

More about the reviewer, Todd Drashner, here.

By Sean Williams

Paperback: 319 pages
Publisher: Ace Books
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-441-01493-4

Plot Summary:

In the future depicted in Saturn Returns, the human race headed out to the stars and spent the next 150,000 years or so expanding to fill the galaxy, modifying itself along the way into innumerable forms suited to life in different environments or to the vagaries of whatever the local culture considered desirable. Unable to move either matter or information faster than the speed of light, humanity instead modified itself to be able to alter its “tempo”, the perception of the passage of time both mentally and physically, virtually at will. Able to “overclock” and compress hours of thought into a few seconds, or slow down so that decades pass like days, humans are able to cope with interstellar distances and create the Continuum, a galaxy spanning civilization.

Connecting all the systems of the galaxy and forming the basis for all civilization is the Line, the network of maser transmitter stations that sends information (and even properly scanned people) all over the galaxy. Ruling over all are the Forts, superhuman group minds made up of thousands or millions of “frags”, human appearing beings that are essentially the hands, eyes, and voices of the controlling superintelligence. The Forts operate more slowly than any other human type, their ‘top level’ thoughts running at such a low tempo that centuries may seem like seconds to them. Finally, for those times when good management or reasoned persuasion fail, there is the Corps, once a mercenary army, but long ago converted to the military arm of Fort governance. So things persist for almost a million years until….

Imre Bergamasc, once the supreme commander of the Corps, wakes in a new body on a starship orbiting just beyond the edge of the galaxy. He has been reconstituted by the Jinc, a subpart of a human gestalt, a sub-Fort group mind that spends its time at the edge of the galaxy looking for God. In their explorations the Jinc came upon the remains of a destroyed satellite orbiting the galaxy. Reconstructing the fragments of the device they discovered a recording of Bergamasc etched into the satellite’s surface and reconstituted it.

Bergamasc’s resurrection is not an easy one. Due to lost data from the satellites destruction his memory is full of gaps, including why he would have his mind stored as it was in the first place. The Jinc inadvertently put his mind in the wrong body (“he” is now a “she”), and despite his desire to get back in touch with the rest of civilization and fill the holes in his past, the Jinc are unable to provide access to the Line or transportation back to the galaxy. Things seem to be heading from bad to worse, with the Jinc possibly attempting to absorb him into the gestalt, when help comes from an unexpected quarter and Bergamasc is able to escape and return to the Milky Way. But things are very much not as he left them.

Expecting to return to the Continuum, Bergamasc quickly learns that the former supercivilization no longer exists. Civilization has fallen or fallen apart, a side-effect of the “Slow Wave”, a mysterious energy pulse that propagated across the galaxy and broke the connections between all frags everywhere, killing the Forts and plunging the galaxy into chaos. Non-Fort humans left to their own devices rapidly make a mess of things and while civilization is not yet gone completely, things are far from what they once were.

Returning to the Mandala Supersystem, a possibly artificial cluster of stars once home to a major civilization, Bergamasc encounters former Corps comrades from his past, makes a number of discoveries pointing to the idea that the Slow Wave may have been just a first strike in an ongoing war, and ultimately sets out to save the galaxy and put civilization back together again. How his quest will progress or end will need to wait for the next book(s) in the series; this story is obviously just the opening act.

OA Relevance: Moderate to High

The variety of human types, the heavy focus on informational technology as one of the foundations of civilization, and the idea of a really old human spacefaring civilization will all resonate with OA fans. In some ways and with some modifications this story could almost be set in the OA universe, probably somewhere in the High Middle Regions or the Outer Volumes, far from the nearest wormhole gate.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

As anyone who reads this column regularly knows, I’ve read books by Williams before with mixed reviews. Based on how the first book in the series shaped up, I’m hoping that the criticisms I’ve leveled in the past won’t come up again this time. Guess we’ll have to wait and see what the next book brings.

On the good side, if you like character driven fiction, you’ll love this book. From beginning to end, its all about the characters who are both interesting and richly drawn, the more so since they may exist in more than one incarnation (Continuum civilization can make copies of a person’s mind you see…). At the same time, the intense focus on the characters sometimes seems to relegate the setting to a two-dimensional sketch. We read off-hand references or background info to the effect that the Continuum could manipulate pulsars and blow up suns, but we never actually see any of it. Continuum civilization is supposed to be almost a million years old, but based on the descriptions provided I sometimes felt that I could have just as readily been reading something set a few hundred years in the future or maybe a few thousand. The ‘sense of wonder’ and sense of antiquity that other authors have achieved when describing such old civilizations was rarely there. But that could just be me.

Perhaps the second biggest complaint I had with the story was that although we are told that humanity has altered itself into all kinds of new forms we never really see this. The different types of humans depicted in the story would all readily pass as near-baselines in the OA universe and possibly even as baselines at first look. This may be because Williams wanted to focus on character issues rather than describing weird looking people but it still bothered me a bit.

The biggest complaint I would level at the book was that while it explicitly stated that FTL travel and comm were not possible, it largely acted as though they were. Characters casually talk about being caught here or there during the Slow Wave and treat Bergamasc as though he has been gone for only a few years when an examination of the sequence of events would have required them to be in their present situation for centuries to thousands of years. The bad guys react to events almost instantly and show up at just the best dramatic moment, often in situations where that would seem to be impossible if light speed were truly a limiting factor. And so on. The idea of variable temporal perception is intriguing and Williams is exploring an interesting new area I’ve only seen one or two other authors every set foot in. But he could have done much more with it and should have paid closer attention to the realities imposed by light speed limited events if he is going to make that a foundational element of his book. Truthfully it would have worked better if he had just introduced some sort of FTL drive and been done with it.

Overall Rating: Good

If you like character driven space opera, you will love this book. If you’re more into gadgets or like a good dose of scenery and travelogue along with your story of a strange far future, then you may be left a bit wanting.

More about the reviewer, Todd Drasher, here.

By Sean Williams with Shane Dix

Geodesica: Ascent
Paperback: 379 pages
Publisher: The Penguin Group
Language: English
ISBN: 0-441-01269-8

Geodesica: Descent
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: The Penguin Group
Language: English
ISBN: 0-441-01378-3

Plot Summary:

In the late 21st to mid-22nd century humanity invented a faster-than-light drive (although not hugely faster) and expanded to the stars, finding occasional evidence of vanished alien civilizations along the way. Late in this process the Singularity took place in the Sol system which then apparently cut off all contact with its various colonies. Human civilization continued among the stars until the 24th century when suddenly Sol appears on the scene again, conquers the scattered human colonies using superior technology and establishes the Exarchate. Under Exarchate rule, solar systems are renamed and are each controlled by an “Exarch”, a multi-plexed post-human operating in multiple augmented bodies. In OA terms they would fall somewhere between a Superior and an S1 transapient.

Some thirty years into the rule of the Exarchate, a new alien artifact is discovered when it drifts into the solar system of the colony world of Sublime. What it is is not clear but just as the investigation has begun; a swarm of nanoreplicators explodes out of the artifact, consumes the research station, then the planet, and then most of the Sublime solar system and forms a shell of interdiction around the entire star. Presumably everything in the system, including its ruling Exarch, has been destroyed. Now jump forward ten years.

The Palmer starship (or Cell as they are called) Nhulunbuy discovers a second artifact in deep space and transports it to the system of Bedlam, ruled by the Exarch Isaac Deangelis. Under a heavy veil of secrecy the artifact (codenamed Geodesica) is deposited in a rapidly constructed research facility and begins to be (very carefully) studied. Very quickly, exciting and disturbing things begin to be discovered.

The artifact appears to be an entrance to some sort of tunnel-like network, although a network of what is unclear. The hope (and fear) is that the artifact could be the key to a new form of interstellar travel, perhaps one much faster than the FTL drive that even the Exarchate is still limited to. Although no definitive evidence of this has been found yet, various parties start to act on this assumption. And the chase is on.

Within the Exarchate various rebel elements become apparent and attempt to wrest control away from Deangelis and the central authority of Sol only to be stopped by the intervention of the Archon, a mysterious entity who represents that authority and who is as far beyond the Exarchs as they are beyond humans. Among the human population of Bedlam, Melilah Awad, almost two centuries old and chafing under Exarchate rule demands that all information about the artifact be released for the benefit of all. And the Palmer starship captain Eogan, once Melilah’s lover and no longer totally human since joining the Palmers, is caught in the middle.

Vast forces build around the Bedlam system and we learn that the destruction of Sublime was neither the result of alien technology, nor as complete as had been believed. As Book 1 ends a climactic battle ensues, Bedlam falls to the same forces that destroyed Sublime, and Deangelis, Melilah, and Eogan are propelled through the artifact and into the network it leads to.

As the second book of the Geodesica series opens, we find Isaac Deangelis, Melilah Awad, and Palmer Eogan fleeing through the alien space-time network of Geodesica pursued by hunter-killer drones sent by the Archon. Meanwhile, the rebellion among the Exarchate is growing and threatening to descend into civil war. We see various elements of all this through the eyes of Isaac Deangelis in different incarnations (remember that Exarchs operate in multiple bodies and Deangelis was fragmented during the events around Bedlam). The story cuts back and forth between events inside the Geodesica network and the building war against the Archon and Sol until finally we find ourselves millions of years in the future where events reach a rather unexpected climax. Geodesica plays games with space as well as with time you see and what seems like only days or weeks inside the network to our heroes, turns out to be rather a lot…longer.

The resulting conclusion is both inspirational and bittersweet. We see a far future humanity quite different from most depictions and end on a note of both closure and new horizons opening.

OA Relevance: Moderate

The Geodesica novels paint an interesting picture of the future containing a number of OA-esque elements, but feel quite different. The Exarchs are somewhat super-human but often depicted in ways that show they are also still all too human as well. The Archon is something else again but is onstage for a relatively short time.

The science depicted is not very hard nor do the books make any particular pretensions to that goal. This is space opera and the goal of the super-advanced technology is to advance the story, not provide a physics lesson. That said, there are several concepts that were sufficiently compelling that I found myself wondering how such a thing might work in OA. In particular the Palmer “Cells”, fractal holographic starships operating as swarms of independently maneuvering units and able to bud off functionally identical sub-parts (with a corresponding loss of size and mass) or fuse them together to make a larger vessel are fascinating. By far this will probably be the most interesting concept from the perspective of an OA minded worldbuilder or speculative thinker.

The rest of the story’s concepts are neat, or at least compellingly described, although I occasionally felt that the Exarchs as described were a bit too human. But that could just be me.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Williams and Dix have done a number of SF stories (usually spread across multiple books) with strong transhumanist elements. Having read several of them, I would say a common thread is a strong depiction of an intriguing future that introduces several interesting elements. Unfortunately, a second common thread is that after the first book the story rapidly degenerates into a sort of plodding series of events that runs about a third longer than I really wanted to read. Equally unfortunate, the Geodesica series is no exception.

While the first book sets us up with a number of intriguing events and mysteries, (such that I kept looking for it and ordered it from Amazon the minute it became available), the second book spends most of its time following Deangelis, Awad, and Eogan around inside the Geodesica network while they work out their interpersonal issues and get nowhere very fast. In placing the characters inside an alien FTL transport system, the authors had a chance to wow us with vistas to rival Niven’s Ringworld or Pournelle’s The Avatar (both highly recommended btw). Instead we get to eavesdrop while our characters agonize their way through something like the SF version of a Lifetime movie love triangle and only incidentally explore part of the alien transport network and avoid pursuing killer robots. Character development is all very well but when alien vistas are promised (or at least strongly hinted at) it would be nice if the actual denouement of such managed to do more than bore me. Oh well.

Overall Rating: OK to Good

Buy the first book for the several cool ideas it introduces, especially the Palmer Cell. Buy the second to finish out the story and because the end bits get back a bit of the coolness factor. Buy both books second-hand if you can manage it. Pay new book prices for them and you’ll likely end up feeling you overspent.

More about the reviewer, Todd Drashner, here.