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.

By Alastair Reynolds

ISBN: 978-0-441-01513-9

In Galactic North, Alastair Reynolds returns to the Revelation Space universe with a collection of eight short stories, set both before and after the time period in his earlier books. The Revelation Space series, for those who are not familiar with it, describes a future centuries hence in which humanity, augmented with nanotechnology and genetic engineering, has split into warring factions and expanded to the stars. The stars in the immediate vicinity of Sol have been colonized by slower than light ships and various strange and disturbing alien artifacts have been found. To avoid spoilers I can’t get much more detailed, but I can say that the books are definitely worth reading and that OA counts Reynolds and his work as one of his primary inspirations.

In Galactic North, we get to see more of this universe as well as some of the same characters that we met in the earlier books. We get to learn more about the history of the Conjoiners, whose technology generated group mind often puts them at odds with other human factions and whose technology forms the basis for most interstellar travel. We see more of the civilizations on Sky’s Edge and Yellowstone, two of the primary colonies in the series, and are treated to stories of both hope and terror in equal measure. And finally, in the title story of the book, we learn something of the origins of a threat that is both only lightly touched on and a core component of the earlier books.

OA Relevance: High

Reynolds’ work is a fundamentall inspiration for OA, and he continues to explore OA-esque ideas in his writing.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Reynolds continues to write in a style and venue that most OA fans will probably enjoy. His work is well constructed and does an excellent job of combining character development with mind stretching big ideas and technological cool. And unlike a lot of ‘additional stories in the same universe’ books you don’t need to have read his earlier works to enjoy these (although it certainly helps). About the only quibble I could really find is that it sometimes seems like there are minor consistency issues between this work and his other stories. Interestingly enough, Reynolds includes an afterword in which he talks about this and explains his take on future histories, which somewhat takes care of the issue. All together a very minor issue when set against a set of eight very good stories.

Overall Rating: Highly Recommended:

If you’ve read the Revelation Space series already and liked it you’ll really like these stories as more of the same. If you haven’t you’ll probably still like them and then want to get yourself to your local bookseller to pick up the other books. Enjoy.

More about the author, Todd Drashner, here.

• Gridlinked – ISBN: 0-765-34905-1
• The Line of Polity – ISBN: 0-330-48435-4
• Brass Man – ISBN: 0-330-41159-4
• Polity Agent – ISBN: 1-4050-5498-0

All books published by Tor (http://www.tor-forge.com/)

Rather than reviewing a single book, I thought I’d do something different and review an entire series. Partly because in order to really enjoy the books you need to read them in the proper order. Partly because the author is really telling one giant story in multiple volumes and so in a way this counts as a review of a single work.

Synopsis:

Centuries in the future the Human Polity is ruled by superhuman Artificial Intelligences (because humans cannot be trusted), people can step across interstellar distances using the “runcible” a space warping transport gate that provides instantaneous travel, and humanity is starting to diverge into a variety of different forms due to genetic modifications, body mods, and direct neural interfaces and augmentations that can enhance intelligence and allow people to merge their minds directly with computers. Humans work in partnership with Golems, humanoid (mostly) sapient robots who, while not as smart as the ruling AIs are still rather a lot more capable than humans. To date there are various artifacts of past alien races but only one recorded instance of contact with an alien intelligence, which went very strangely.

Set against the ever expanding Polity are the Separatists, humans who claim that they are fighting for humanities “freedom” against the enslaving AIs, but who seem to spend most of their time committing acts of terrorism against civilians, torturing and killing people they don’t like (often other Separatists), and otherwise doing little to actually convince anyone that life under them would be more desirable than life under AI control. The Polity mostly only “Subsumes” worlds voluntarily (although it can make exceptions if there is a reason to do so, as well as having a strong influence on worlds associating with it) and worlds have even seceded from the Polity at various times (although the resulting chaos caused by humans attempting to rule themselves usually leads to a rapid return to the fold).

The law enforcement and covert ops arm of the Polity is Earth Central Security (ECS) and its foremost agent is Ian Cormac. Cormac is something of a combination of the James Bond type secret agent, military commander, and missionary for the cause. He is driven, ruthless, and unbending in the face of adversity but also somewhat troubled both by the occasionally enigmatic pronouncements of the AI and the equally enigmatic pronouncements of the one alien contact that the Polity has had and in which Cormac played a pivotal role. Unusually for Earth Central forces he is virtually unaugmented or altered except for his “gridlink”, an implanted direct neural interface that allows him to communicate directly with AIs and various other devices, control his bodies functions consciously, and write useful computer programs in his head to control both his mind, body, and external hardware if required. Unfortunately for Cormac, a side effect of the gridlink is a loss of humanity, limiting its use for most people to about 10 years. Cormac has had his for some 12 years and the effects have finally reached the point that Earth Central (the primary AI that rules the Polity) orders it turned off. Which makes Cormac’s life rather more complicated as Gridlinked (the first book in the series) gets going.
There has been a runcible malfunction on the world of Samarkand, essentially destroying that world (runcible travel involves rather a lot of energy and if something goes wrong the results can be…spectacular). Earth Central orders Cormac to investigate just as his cover is being blown during an anti-Separatist covert ops mission on the world of Cheyne III. Cormac kills one of the Separatist leaders and escapes but not before the leader’s brother, Arian Pelter, swears vengeance and sets out to find and kill Cormac.

Most of the rest of the book involves Cormac’s struggle with the loss of his gridlink while trying to investigate the event on Samarkand, the efforts of Pelter to find Cormac and assemble the forces to kill him (including using a mad Golem known as Mr. Crane), and indications that there is third party influencing events in the Polity and outside it. Things come to a head as Cormac and his associates learn that the accident on Samarkand was not and was probably caused by the vast alien entity known as Dragon which Cormac had encountered years before and which was thought to have been destroyed at the culmination of that encounter. Dragon it turns out is very much alive (although somewhat altered) and still very much interested in Cormac. Several climactic battle scenes later Pelter and his forces are dead, Dragon has been defeated and perhaps destroyed again, and there is First Contact with a new type of alien with indications that the future is going to be very interesting. Which takes us to books II and III in the series.

The next book of the Agent Cormac series is set some years after Gridlinked although many of the characters introduced in the first book are seen again here. The Line of Polity opens as Cormac and a strike force are attacking a Separatist base on an alien world to rescue the “bio-phsicist” Skellor who has been kidnapped (or so they believe). The reality turns out to be rather different.

Skellor , it turns out, is working with the Separatists, not because he agrees with their cause but because he finds Polity notions of morality and ethics in the pursuit of knowledge annoyingly restrictive and seeks to bypass them. During the resulting battle and its aftermath we learn that Skellor has gained access to an ancient alien device known as a “Jain node”. The Jain have been extinct for millions of years but during their heyday they apparently moved suns and planets and developed a nanotechnology that vastly outstrips the abilities of the Polity. A Jain node encapsulates that entire technology and all of its abilities in a ‘seed’ about the size of a chicken’s egg. A sapient being who takes a Jain node into their body is transformed into an entity of incredible power in their own right if they can control it. And Skellor has the means to control. He has linked his mind with an AI, a process that augments intelligence to superhuman levels (the core technology of the Polity, the runcible gate, was invented by such a union) but that is ultimately fatal for both the human and the AI. But with the Jain technology permeating his body Skellor can prevent this. The results of this union are both impressive and disturbing.

In short order, Skellor escapes the Polity although Cormac is determined to find him again. However, Cormac is diverted to investigate an apparent nano-attack on a Polity space station which bears troubling similarities to the attack that destroyed the runcible on Samarkand years before and which is described in Gridlinked. He and his team are involved with this investigation as well as trying to locate Skellor and are traveling on the ECS dreadnought Occam Razor when they once again encounter the alien Dragon (thought to be destroyed twice now). Dragon is injured and drifting in space but the Occam Razor is able to attach it to the hull and continue its journey. But then things get complicated.

Skellor (who stowed away on the ship during the attack on the Separatist base) attacks and takes over the entire ship, killing its captain and controlling AI both. He attempts to kill Cormac and his fellows but they escape with the help of Dragon. Undeterred Skellor takes the Occam Razor and after some delay seeks to follow, with both parties ending up in the Separatist colony system of Masada. Masada is a thoroughly unpleasant place, with a ruling religious hierarchy living in orbital habitats and a slave population of humans living on the planetary surface where they work various farming projects and dodge the planets voracious lifeforms.

Cormac and his party arrive at Masada first and with some help from Dragon (who appears to die yet again) manage to get down to the planetary surface and into hiding. Shortly thereafter Skellor appears, wipes out or enslaves the ruling orbital population, and sets out to locate Cormac on the surface for the purpose of killing him as painfully as possible. After various adventures (during which humanity gains new allies from Dragon’s legacy) Cormac again manages to escape and leads Skellor into a trap that destroys the Occam Razor and apparently Skellor as well. But it is not to be.

In the third book, Brass Man, we learn that Skellor was not destroyed but only much reduced in capability. Discovered by an itinerant asteroid miner he escapes again and heads out in search of Dragon. Skellor is noticing some troubling behavior in the Jain technology that he has incorporated into himself and thinks that Dragon (as an example of alien technology itself) may be able to explain what is going on. Before setting out on his quest however, Skellor decides he needs some backup and heads to the world of Veridian. Veridian is the world from the first book, Gridlinked, where Arian Pelter and his mad Golem Mr. Crane were destroyed but Skellor is not one to let a little thing like death stop him. He locates and resurrects Mr. Crane and then sets out to find Dragon.

While this is going on Cormac and his fellows (who have been in quarantine for a year along with entire solar systems where Skellor operated) learn of his survival and escape and set out to locate him again. Ultimately they track him to the previously unknown world of Cull where he has gone seeking Dragon. Cull is a primitive world, colonized centuries before by an early FTL starship crewed by a combination of humans and human tweaks adapted to live on the planet. Centuries after the initial colonization there is a low tech but rapidly advancing civilization that seeks to develop the means to get back into space and into the orbiting colony ship that was abandoned above.

Trapped on Cull by the crash of his spacecraft and determined not to be taken by Cormac who he knows must be close behind, Skellor sets out to enslave the population and transform them into hostages and servants to get him off the planet and away. At first it seems that Cormac will successfully capture (or more likely kill) him anyway but then a new wrinkle develops. Rogue AIs, who think that the Polity’s partnership with humanity is a bad job attack and seek to deal with Skellor to gain access to Jain technology themselves. Things start to get complicated.

In the end Dragon (actually yet another aspect of the original being) manifests once again and helps Cormac to defeat the rogue AIs. Skellor tries to escape using the ancient colony ship but is defeated by a combination of bad luck, continuing odd behavior from his Jain technology (which is disturbingly showing increasing signs of having an agenda of its own), and the manifestation of new abilities in Cormac even the Polity agent is surprised to discover. Skellor is defeated and this time, instead of being destroyed, a segment of Dragon is actually captured.

The final segment of the series to date, Polity Agent, picks up just after the end of Brass Man. This time however events are taking on a greater scope. A Polity Outlink Station, essentially a traveling border outpost that slowly expands the sphere of Polity space, receives a signal from 800 years in the future and the general vicinity of the . It seems that the runcibles that allow instantaneous travel across space can also send things across time (although doing this is horrifically dangerous). In response to the incoming signal the station and the Polity Earth Central AI prep the station for incoming travelers and then open a transport gate across 800yrs and over 150,000 light-years to one of the Magellanic clouds. And people come through, chased by something very much not human.

After the crisis, Ian Cormac is sent in to interview the people who came through the gate, survivors of an expedition to the homeworld of the Maker, the alien entity discovered at the end of the first book in the series, Gridlinked. The Polity had decided to send an expedition to return the Maker to its home civilization in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The trip would take over 800 years to accomplish even with Polity hyperdrive but the crew would spend the time in cold sleep and was chosen from those who liked the idea of such an adventure. However, when the ship arrived in the Cloud it discovered that the Maker civilization was destroyed, consumed by what appears to be Jain technology. It seems that the Makers had encountered and fought against infestation by Jain technology millennia ago but had then seemed to master it and use it to advance their own civilization, among other things creating the biological probe that would eventually be called Dragon. Turns out they were wrong.

It seems that Jain technology, in particular Jain nodes, is actually a sort of trap designed to destroy technological civilizations. In the normal course of things it gives individuals and cultures enormous power, prompting them to use it more and more. But then it also replicates, producing more Jain nodes and causing the host to spread them as far as possible before the ‘seeding’ of the nodes causes the host’s destruction. The Makers knew this but thought they had bypassed the technologies function to their own advantage. And when they sent an expedition to the Milky Way they brought some of the ‘normal’ nodes with them (it seems the Maker’s intentions were rather less than benign). Skellor somehow gained one of the nodes. But there are others that appear to be turning up and Earth Central wants them found and wants to know what is going on. And Ian Cormac is on the case.

Through the rest of the book we watch as Cormac and his team work to track down the infiltration of Jain nodes into human civilization. We learn that there are other elements at work beyond the Makers, and we see the results of other Jain nodes being put to use. A fourth and final(?) aspect of Dragon emerges and contacts the Polity. It all culminates in a massive climax that ends with the Polity learning it just may not be the biggest kid on the block anymore and a promise that the future is about to get very interesting.

OA Relevance: High:

Asher’s Runcible Universe, and the Cormac novels in particular is pure space opera and makes no attempt to be a hard science series. At the same time a lot of the elements contained in OA are found here. There are superhuman AIs ruling humanity, directl neural links, humans altered into various new species either to adapt to new environments (think OA Tweaks) or for the sake of fashion. There is even mention of Singularity, although the AIs of the Polity seem to have said Thanks, But No Thanks to the notion.

The best way I can think to describe Asher’s work is as being something like Banks’ Culture universe or the OA universe but much less cerebral and much more action packed. Readers who would like the Culture or OA more if they had more action will be thrilled. Writers who want to appeal to those readers should treat this whole series as a learning experience and take pointers appropriately. The action and interesting characters aren’t generally dependent on the science in the story and the same principles could be carried to OA (while still maintaining the hard science outlook) with relatively little trouble.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

I find the Runcible Universe and this series in particular great fun and a must read. After reading Gridlinked, I wondered for some time if Asher would ever write a sequel and after learning about the other novels, I immediately ordered them all from Amazon and then lost lots of sleep reading them one right after the other. The characters are interesting, the storyline is fairly compelling, and the OA-esque elements make it all the better.

Now all that said I do have some issues. Asher is writing space opera here and by tradition space opera bad guys are supposed to be Bad. But Asher takes this to such extremes that his villains often come off as raving psychopaths rather than believable people. They also have issues with not being able to shoot straight (at least where Cormac and the other principle characters are concerned) and with being so obsessed with getting Cormac and making him suffer before dying that they miss perfectly good opportunities to just kill him and be done with it. But what the heck, it’s worked in space opera and elsewhere (pick a James Bond movie, any James Bond movie) for decades.

Also, as mentioned previously this is not a hard SF series. There are all the standard tropes: hyper-drives, artificial and anti-gravity, force-fields, and hand-held ray guns of various levels of destructiveness and so on. As mentioned the series makes no claim to be hard-SF and the tropes are standard ones (but occasionally with a nice twist), easily forgiven in the face of a good story. What is perhaps more troubling are those points where I almost got the feeling that Asher was on the verge of losing control of his story or not keeping track of his own rules.

The biggest example of this is with his hyperdrive. In Gridlinked it is described as requiring a ship to get up to a certain speed before being activated and as leaving ships moving at a large fraction of light-speed when they exit ‘underspace’ from which they then have to slow down. Yet in later scenes in the other books ships either require minimal speed up to go FTL or need none at all or drop out of hyperdrive practically in planetary orbit and with little or no need to slow down. And Asher occasionally seems to want to put life-bearing planets around stars chosen more for dramatic effect than scientific plausibility. Basically, my feeling is if you’re going to violate science as we know it, at least be consistent about it. Here and there the Runcible Universe fails that test.

The good news is that Asher also appears to be growing as a writer as he progresses through the books. His villains in the later books actually start to have an agenda beyond just being evil, and there is a growing list of characters whose ultimate disposition and fate is not a foregone conclusion from the moment you meet them. And if there is a bit of a disconnect between the science in the first book and the later books, after the initial shock of transition Asher seems to settle down more and be fairly consistent or at least leaves the door open to the possibility that the difference is due to advances in ship design or something.

Overall Rating: Great Fun and a Good Read:

As long as you go into it prepared to forgive the author having some lapses, you’ll really enjoy this series and have a hard time putting it down. Recommended.

More about the author, Todd Drashner, here.