Rating: 
Summary: Good ideas, loose plot, decaying style
Review: While I thought the first book in this series was excellent, packed with all sorts of cool stuff from the impact of redactable senses and memory on people and society on up to self-aleration of thought and the legal consequences thereof, too many of those ideas have gone on from supporting concepts or themes to become plot devices, instead. While the upending of half the story and assumptions in the first novel was brutally effective, and a jarring shock, creating the ultimate unreliable narrator, Mr. Wright pulls that particular rabbit out of his hat one too many times and it really begins to lose its impact. A lot of the ideas that made the first novel so interesting are old hat here, and there's the sense that they're used to prop up a flagging story rather than illuminate the (post)human condition.
In addition, Mr. Wright's Objectivist philosophy begins to surface here (though not to the extent it does in the third book), and bits of this novel can begin to read a bit like Atlas Shrugged, set in the year 10000AD. Given the similiarities between Ms. Rand's characters and Mr. Wright's, I suspect it's intentional. If you enjoyed (or at least tolerated) Atlas Shrugged, it can make reading "The Phoenix Exultant" a fun game of 'find the paralell'. If Atlas Shrugged annoyed you, then this novel will start to grate on your nerves fairly quickly once you reach the midpoint.
If you enjoyed the first one, and have to see how it all turned out, give it a read, just don't expect much more than potboiler entertainment and an increasingly thinly-disguised rehashing of standard Objectivist tropes.
Rating: 
Summary: Strong outer space tale
Review: With his exile, Phaethon knows that his life will never be the same (see THE GOLDEN AGE). Instead of the advantages he has received as a member of powerful and wealthy Radmanthus House, Phaeton will traverse the solar system on a quest to regain all he lost starting with his memory.However, though humans, other strange life forms, and sentient machines might want to offer their help, anyone who actually assists the exile risks banishment too. Still some intelligent beings refuse to allow a threat to stop their assistance of Phaethon. The Old Woman of the Sea whose mind traverses all sea creatures and the surviving residue of a mass mind do not fear exile and aid the expatriate. Soon Phaethon concludes that essences from another star system plan to eradicate him and probably his people beginning with his logging onto the Mentality, but still he believes he must do all he can to save the stagnating society that he was once the Prime. THE PHOENIX EXULTANT, Volume Two of The Golden Age trilogy, displays John C. Wright's skills in species building so that the reader believes in the varying, several weird, races that populate his galaxy. The story line is exciting as the hero goes on a quest, but also suffers to a minor degree from the genre's bane, middle speculative fiction syndrome (better known as MFSF). New readers will enjoy the tale, but gain much more from reading the first novel before perusing this delightful book for better understanding. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for a fast-acting sense-of-wonder recharge.
Review: ____________________________________________ I loved it. PHOENIX continues on from the cliff-hanger that ends vol. 1. Phaethon has indeed been banished, ostracized, cast out of the Golden Oecumene, for rocking the boat... I should stop here and reiterate that PHOENIX is emphatically NOT a stndalone. You will absolutely need to start with vol. 1 to make sense of this, and even then, it can be hard going. But worth the effort, and a lot of fun. Anyway, PHOENIX opens with one of the neatest bits of recapitulation I've ever seen, and most welcome, too, as it's been 18 months or so since I read #1. The writing here is considerably smoother than in the first book, and the story is simpler and more linear --though I'm sorry to say the proofreading hasn't improved a bit (sigh). Cool covers, though. OK, here's the reliable Paul Di Filippo, if you'd like a coherent, real review: [google at scifi.com] "Wright dances brilliantly back and forth between... romance and talk of tightly woven superstrings and mesonic disrupters. Another thread is classic space opera: The whole contest between the Golden Oekumene and the Second Oekumene rings of nothing so much as the battle between Arisia and Boskone in Doc Smith's Lensmen series." Sheer narrative pleasure, that's a good way to put it. The first half of #2 is a fairly routine (but fun!) "can't keep a good engineer down" romp --and I'm doing Wright a bit of a disservice, because there are still a dozen neat ideas per chapter --but PHOENIX really starts to rock when Daphne Tercius Semi-Rhadamanth makes her re-entrance, Daphne Tercius being the successor (sort of) to Daphne Prime, Mrs. Phaethon, who's hiding from him, and reality, inside an impregnable VR vault... Anyway, Daphne3 is bright, sharp-witted, and determined, but Phaethon is so incredibly thick in dealing with her, you want to whack him upside the head. Gah! Their interactions are a delight, even if Phaethon isn't. Plus, we learn more about Atkins Vingt-et-un, the Last Soldier. And move in to Mercury, to fire up the Phoenix Exultant! What can I say? Wright is very, very good for a fast-acting sense-of-wonder recharge, and PHOENIX is a welcome return to straightforward storytelling from the baroque splendors of GOLDEN-1. And I kept getting the frissons of delight, wonder and strangeness that are the reason I read SF. So, guys, it ain't perfect, but I predict Wright's GOLDEN AGE series will be delighting readers for a long time to come. And I'm more than ready for The Golden Transcendence, vol. 3, now available (and should be in my hands RSN). Interview by Nick Gevers (highly recommended):
[Google at SF Site]
[on his influences]
"Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe are masters of style, and I filch from them without a twinge of remorse. The men are brilliant. They are the only authors I enjoyed as a child whom I can still enjoy as an adult. Of the two of them, I have a mild preference for Jack Vance. Gene Wolfe, in fact, is too brilliant for me: I cannot figure out his puzzles. The mysteries in Jack Vance, in contrast, are honest and fair, and the clues are there..."
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Note 1). Apparently, Wright had planned for a 2-volume issue, but vol. 2 ran long, and the publisher decided to split it. IB Golden Age was conceived as one long novel.
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