Rating: 
Summary: Cool Ideas
Review: This is the first volume in a series? Trilogy? I dunno. I can say that at least two more books follow it.So once again, it's the future: 2165 or around about that. It appears that by 2050, Earth had become all peaceable and stuff and also monstrously prosperous, thanks to technology. So everyone became real keen on exploring space. 'Cept that it would be really expensive and not terribly feasible to send human crews blasting around for hundreds of years to reach our nearest neighbors. So engram crews were sent instead: super-complex software recreations of actual people, or bodiless clones, if you will. This meant that the ships just basically had to be flying computers with some nanofacturing capabilities to build stuff at the destination. Also the engrams could basically ride along in stand-by mode, more or less sleeping, so as to not, you know, flip out through the sheer boredom of the long voyage. Well, at this here one distant destination, many light years away, and a hundred years after launch time, one engram does wig out over the basic disconnect over "my memories tell me I am Peter but really I know I am a computer program in a VR environment". So his crew dumps him in an android body on the planet's surface and tells him to just kind of putter about at the base camp there and stay out of their way. They get no transmissions from Earth, so obviously something happened during the trip and the home planet cannot or will not talk to them (although of course any real-time communications would be out of the question due to the years-long time lag). A coupla years later, the engrams are just minding their business and building robo-facilities and exploring and stuff, when, within a day, a bunch of linked orbital towers get connected via space elevator to the surface. Who built these, and how and why, are mysteries. Pete the engram/android flies over to the base of one of the tower-things and gets a free ride up to the spindle attached above, way up in orbit. Then a pack of alien AIs go all, "I am for you, Peter" and tell him, yeah, some benevolent super-aliens just did a quick fly-by and built this whole complex installation with some of their Model T-level technology, 'cuz they're all hyper-advanced but they like to throw a few crumbs at the more primitive species they encounter, to help 'em bootstrap their way up. And oh, yeah, the alien AIs will only talk to and obey Peter and no one else in the crew. So the novel goes from there. Who are these aliens? What do they want? Are they good? Are they bad? Should the engrammites use all of the kewl toys the aliens have given them? And what has become of Earth in the meantime? This is a tale on yer epic Clarkean scale with a bit of Vernor Vinge thrown in. Huge revelations are...um...revealed. And action takes place on literally a stellar level. Lots of big ideas get thrown around. (The authors are a little too proud of their use of the revised Planckian measurement system, but it shows how seriously they take some of their scientific gimcrackery.) It's pretty good and definitely bold. Zesty, with a big finish and a slightly nutty aftertaste. I enjoyed it, and my cat Mr. Hate gives it his highest recommendation of "I would sleep on top of that book".
Rating: 
Summary: Science Fiction For The Intellectual
Review: This novel begins with a man taking a bath for his first time in about one hundred years, and zips on from there. It is the mid 22nd century and survey ships from earth are arriving at distant stars after very long voyages. The crews consist of engrams which are electronic personalities, copies of real people's minds, sent out to explore distant reaches of space. One ship, the Frank Tipler, was sent to a planet orbiting the star Upsilon Aquarium, over 72 light years from earth. Nanotech can manufacture bodies so the engrams can inhabit them, to work and explore the planet's surface, etc. For the most part the engrams remain aboard ship as cyberspace beings, the real ship only a few meters across, mostly just a computer with few moving parts, cool! Simulated living quarters and bridge create a liveable environment for them, the engrams can even slow or speed up their perception of time as they see a need for, with their internal clocks, so a flight to the stars taking decades may seem to take only a few days to them. All this is really nothing original, these authors, Sean Williams and Shane Dix, use these concepts cleverly in a well written novel. This is the way we will likely explore the stars someday, take human minds as engrams aboard small compact starships, with a mature nanotechnology able to manifest the humans (and any supplies needed) at the destination, using local materials. As with a lot of good science fiction lately, the identity question is given good treatment here: should a person be considered the original, or a copy, as that person's consciousness is tranferred into various formats. Also in this novel the authors feature an alien first contact that is very believable, that is rare and difficult to do, well done here. My only criticism of this book is how a "Spike" (a period of very rapid technological advancement which overturns nearly everything that existed prior...if you don't know) is presented, I feel it was overdone, my opinion. For me this was a great adventure in the hard science fiction tradition, great plot and character development, Dix and Williams are adept at illustrating our oftentimes fragile relationships with each other, brilliantly executed, a page turner and one of the best sci-fi you are likely to find. The authors in my view have left room for a sequel.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read!
Review: Wow! What imagry! After reading this book I'm now very picky on others that I read. The pictures, situations, planets, travel... everything seemed to flow exactly with each other. I'll tell you this... don't stop reading untill the ending. Even after the climax keep reading, it'll give you insights on the sequal (in which there HAS to be one) plus things that will make you think for days. Hey, I liked this book so much I read it four times. I scan the book stand every time for it's sequal.
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