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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent world-building and military action
Review: A thousand years from now, humanity has spread through the solar system--and mankind is no longer alive. Artificial intelligences have grown so complex that they have taken on life--become 'free converts.' And 'physical' humans themselves have uploaded themselves into the omnipresent nanotechnology/communications net. War has broken out between the inner (Mercury/Venus/Earth/Mars) systems and the interconnected 'Met' and the outer systems with the inner systems, under director Ames, attempting to eliminate human rights for the free converts and to bring everyone under centralized control. The outer systems are outnumbered, outgunned, and faced with stupid generals, but they have powerful weapons of their own and fight back hard. Author Tony Daniel examines the lives of a number of people living in both the Met and in the outer systems, exploring the developing war through their eyes and virtual eyes. A young woman develops an affair with a nine-hundred year-old jeep, a rock-balancing monk re-falls in love, a punk-kid is adicted to 'glory' and a free-convert military leader tries to hold off the overwhelming force of the inner systems' attack. Daniel does a fine job balancing the lives of different 'people' with the need to move the story along. His powerful world-building provides a strong structure on which to hang the story and it works. SUPERLUMINAL is a big book (and part of a series) but it didn't take long for me to get hooked into it--reading until my wife had to beg me to turn the light off so she could sleep. The combination of first-class world-building, intriguing characters, and innovative military action adds up to one of the best Science Fiction titles I've read in years.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic space opera action!
Review: I had to read this book a second time after finishing it because it was so incredibly well-written and action-packed! Being an avid sci-fi fan of books old and new, I have happily added this amazing work of sci-fi adventure to other books: "Stranger in a Strange Land", "Puppet Masters", "Foundation", "2001", "2010", "Rendezvous with Rama", "Ringworld", all the "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" books, as well as books as new to the genre as "Advent of the Corps" and others.
Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding continuation ... but not a conclusion
Review: Superluminal is a strong continuation of Metaplanetary. Other reviewers' comments regarding the quality of characters, plot, and writing are spot on. If you enjoy classic space opera (as we all should), you'll be grateful for Superluminal. Be aware, however, that this volume does not provide a conclusion to the story begun in Metaplanetary, merely a continuation. I wish that the publisher had been honest enough to flag clearly that this is an open-ended series, each ending in a cliffhanger rather than a climax. There's nothing wrong with that approach, either from a literary or a commercial point of view -- I just wish that publishers would note which books are self-contained and which are installments in a series.
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