Rating: 
Summary: Compelling, well-imagined novel of the far future
Review: This is quite an impressive first novel, with big, fascinating ideas at its core. It is set in a far future Solar System in which most people live in some variety of Virtual Reality, with careful rules governing the interactions of people using different tyles of VR. The hero is called Phaethon, and he is the son of a powerful man named Helion. Both are engineers, and have teamed up in such projects as turning Jupiter into a second sun, and building machines to extend the life of the Sun, while making its environs safer. But as the book opens, Phaethon becomes aware hat he has lost a couple centuries of his memory, apparently voluntarily. He soon learns that he has committed some grave offense against society, but not a crime. Both his wife and his father seem oddly estranged from him. And he doesn't know what he did!This novel, the first of a two-part series, involves Phaethon slowly learning the truth about his "offense", and why he has lost his memory, and what's going on with his wife and father, nd what is his real identity and purpose in life. Wright uses this process of discovery to also show the reader some of the exotic nature of this curious future. I found it a compelling book, well-imagined and trying hard to do more than just display an exotic future, to do more than just tell a story: also to mean something. I look forward to the sequel.
Rating: 
Summary: Timothy Leary Lives
Review: This might have been pretty good if I'd been stoned when I read it. It's 10,000 years in the future and folks live forever if they choose and can do whatever they want...as long as their bank account is fat enough...and even the poorest of the poor seem to be living pretty good. Of course, people being people they still manage to screw up occasionally, but it doesn't matter since they just have their memories redacted and then they can go on living like the big screw up never happened. But what if they want the memory back? Oops, time to call in the all knowing mega-computers to figure out a plan to outsmart the other mega-computers that are cramping your style, er, memory. Maybe this book is just a acid trip put to paper. Maybe you have to be on acid to try to describe human life 10,000 years from now. Maybe you have to be on acid to enjoy it.
Rating:
Summary: Drags, drags, drags - then leaves you hanging
Review: What a wonderful imaginatively described world - then it's wonderfully, imaginatively described some more, with lots of inventive, esoteric terms for mind states - and then some more description - and then some more - with little action, then less, then less, as we wander through characters' memories, philosophies, observations . . . You get the picture. Brilliant idea, poorly educated, and, worst of all, unresolved at novel's end - you'll have to buy another book, and after that one more, to find out the resolution. And I just CAN'T labor through any more florid descriptions. So, reluctantly, I say: don't buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: A spectacular debut!
Review: Where can one start in reviewing this book? It is tremendously entertaining, at once a grand space opera, a detective story, and a much-less-grimy-than-genre cyberpunk narrative, with enough philosophy and depth to keep things interesting without getting bombastic or tedious. If you like any one of these things, you should consider this novel. There is a lot of detail and far-future terminology (the names alone are fascinating) thrown at us from the very beginning. However, Wright wisely doesn't spend a lot of time trying to tell us how all of the technology works, or explaining all the details of the richly-imagined Golden Oecumene. We figure it out through context and the actions of the characters, which helps keep the story moving without getting bogged down. The Golden Oecumene is also refreshing in the SF genre, as an imagining of the far future that is neither dystopian nor utopian-but-hiding-a-dark-secret. At its core, this is an optimistic novel, and optimism is often sorely lacking in SF. If there is any obvious flaw in this book, it is that the ending seems somewhat abrupt; I suspect that this books was the first half of a larger volume that was arbitrarily chopped in half by the publisher. Hence, the "Volume 2" designation on the sequel, "The Phoenix Exultant." Buy both books and read "The Phoenix Exultant" immediately afterward; you will be glad you did.
Rating:
Summary: Superb details and imagination, but narrative pace drags
Review: Wright paints a description of life in an ultratech future society in incredible detail. Every page has new descriptive passages of the way things are experienced in a sort of quasi-virtual reality (called the Mentality), the richness of the surroundings, the various different characters and neuroforms and so on. Unfortunately the narrative pace suffers terribly, as the mass of detail - both the story's greatest strength and its greatest weakness - means that the story drags, and is tedious to read. Just when the action starts to pick up and I want to find out what happens to Phaethon next, Wright switches to a several page long description of the scenery or details about one of the characters or whatever.
A word of warning - this book ends on a cliff hanger. If you want to read the whole story, you will need to read all three books.
Despite this, I have given this book 4 stars, simply because some of the ideas here are so imaginative and original.
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