Rating: 
Summary: Good ideas, poor execution
Review: This was one of those rare few books I couldn't get through, gave up 2/3 of the way in. The technological ideas in the book are teriffic. But the author contantly bounces around from viewpoint to viewpoint, from character to character, time period to time period, without letting you get to know, and therefore care about, any of them. For example, the characters in the introduction don't have even the slightest bearing on anything for the next several hundred pages, and quite frankly the book may have been more tolerable if those early chapters were completely axed. For that matter, much of the technology is presented as an entire chapter of asides that interrupt any flow the story would normally have had, had it not bounced around so much.
Rating: 
Summary: Cool Stuff!
Review: Tony Daniel is one of those writers who makes you wonder why he is writing science fiction. The concept of hollow tubes linking the planets is fairly silly, although the hand-waving to explain it is interesting. But heck, the story and characters are so compelling that by halfway through I was willing to buy anything Daniel told me, if it got me to the next page.Not great science fiction, but great fiction just the same.
Rating: 
Summary: Not if you like hard SF
Review: Too much meaningless verbiage - Too little knowledge of how the universe actually works. Belongs in the fantasy section midway between the Oz books and Perdido Street Station.
Rating:
Summary: First class space opera
Review: Updates the genre with nanotech and AI vying for citizenship. Very entertaining. Annoyingly, quits in the middle for the obvious sequel.
Rating:
Summary: Between 3 and 4 Stars
Review: Very interesting first volume. The reviewers failed to mention that this is the start of a series. I have to buy the second volume to find out what happens in Daniel's universe.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting story bogged by science babble...
Review: You can tell the author is in science or High Tech career-wise because he stops the action to explain all kinds of detail (invented or real) behind scientific advances that a crucial to the plot. This is bad interruption to the story-pace and you also get confused as to who is "talking" from one chapter to the next. As a result I found myself speed-reading such 'detail' to know how this 'new stuff' works to help follow the plot. Despite these frustrations the basic story is riveting, there are plenty of interesting and rich characters to keep things busy and engaging, and things do move along. Good use of psychological evil, although the way the lead bad guy's evil personality is created is hackneyed. I'm not sure this author is very organized in his story planning, he introduces characters as a group or family and then we track some of them but totally forget the others as if they don't matter at all anymore. There are definitely some great concepts here, some compelling characters and a good story line, enough to keep me absorbed and turning pages. But it wasn't a masterpiece by any means.
Rating:
Summary: Grand and involving
Review: _Metaplanetary_ is a grand, involving, novel set in 3013 C. E., in a fully colonized solar system which is about to burst into a vicious civil war. It is chock full of neat, if perhaps not always fully plausible (indeed at times quite wacky), SFnal ideas. It managed to excite my somewhat jaded sense of wonder, and it made me care deeply about quite a few characters, and it advances some interesting and worthwhile moral themes. Its main flaw is that it doesn't end so much as stop -- it's part of a two book series (the sequel will be called _Superluminal_), and it really does not stand alone. (This is not indicated on the published book, for which the publisher should be criticized.) Another, lesser, flaw, perhaps, is that the villain is really evil -- no moral ambiguity there. The solar system in 3000 or so is divided into basically two sections. The inner system, called the Met, consists of the inner four planets, and a gloriously weird system of tubes connecting them, which makes the whole thing look like a spider web, sort of. Many people seem to live in the tubes, or in nodes of the system, called bolsas. Mercury, with all that energy available, is the dominant planet. Earth has been largely returned to nature. The outer planetary systems have all been colonized, with varying degrees of success. Triton, Neptune's big moon, is one of the most successful colonies. In addition, a number of artificially intelligent ships live permanently in space, particularly the Oort clouds, and they have traveled as far as Alpha Centauri. (These are called cloudships.) The Met doesn't reach to the outer system because the asteroid belt is impractical to cross with the tubes (perhaps due simply to authorial fiat). Besides the Met, the other key SFnal notion of the book is "grist". Basically, grist is very "smart" nanotech. Most if not all humans have an integrated bunch of grist attached, called a pellicle, which hosts a version of their personality in AI form, called a convert. There are also "free converts", AI's based on scans of human brains but which don't have a biological body. Humans can interact with both free converts and with the "attached" converts of other humans in Virtual space, and all of the system, pretty much, is instantaneously connected by a grist network called the merci. And some humans are what are called LAP's -- Large Array of Personas: they are in essence a network of clones and converts that can be physically and virtually in many places at once. For the most part, the solar system is in something of a Golden Age. The physical needs of people seem to be well supplied. A critical political issue is the rights of "free converts". Some do not consider them "Human" -- they are just computer programs, in this view, without real free will, without, if you will, "souls". But others, especially in the outer system, regard them as clearly human. The novel is told from a variety of points of view: a couple of cloudships; a free convert named Danis Graytor; Danis' human husband Kelly; their daughter Aubry (who has a human body but is considered a "half free convert"); an artificial woman named Jill with a body made of grist and a brained based on a ferret's; Colonel Roger Sherman, the military leader of Triton's forces; Sherman's son Lee; Director Ames, the leader of the Met government; General San Filieu, an aging Catalan woman under Ames influence who leads the Met attack on Triton; and more. This gives us a good look at the variety of ways people live in this future, and at what it is like to be a free convert, or a cloudship, or a human with a pellicle and convert attachment, or a LAP. This also helps keep the action moving, important in a fairly long book. The action of the novel is exciting and fascinating. We see atrocities, such as some clever means of torturing AIs, and a brutal attack on Triton with some scary uses of space tech; and we see heroism in the resistance to these atrocities. We see convincing depictions of sex between humans and AIs, and of alternate means of travel in a physically linked solar system, and of AI entertainment. We get useful glimpses of the history of this future: the young life of Director Ames, the development of the cloudships, the invention of grist and the merci. It's a fairly long book, but never boring. The main characters are fully rounded. I found the villains interesting, but it must be admitted that they are depicted with rather a broad brush of evil. Daniel gives his different characters and narrators different voices. His prose is generally sound, occasionally lapsing into cliche, but at other times very nice. His scope is vast, and his theme is one of the great SF themes: "What is a human?" He illustrates this nicely with his array of characters of vastly different "shape" or composition; and he metaphorically illustrates even more nicely the associated conflict of viewpoints between individualists and collectivists: hinting by the end at a truly scary collectivist vision. The scary parts of the book are convincing and often quite original, and very scary: and the heroism is moving and believable. I really liked this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful hard-SF space-opera, but v.1 of 2
Review: _________________________________________
Tony Daniel has been a 'new author to watch' for the past few years.
Now he's come through with his first major novel, and it's a winner. The setup: it's 3013 AD. Humanity has spread throughout the solar
system. The Inner System is bound together -- literally -- by
enormous, quasi-organic nanotech cables -- the Met -- which provide
both transport and living space. The cableways end at the asteroids,
and the Outer System is freer and more tolerant of human-level
artficial intelligences. Beyond Pluto is the domain of the sentient
cloudships, who dominate the Outer System economy, and who have
made the first tentative interstellar settlements. A dictator is emerging in the Inner System, and quickly rises to
dominate this closely-bound polity. He is enslaving the 'free
converts', the more-or-less pure-software AI's. A war is coming, over
what it means to be human.... Here's Paul Di Filippo's review, the best I found online:
[google at scifi.com] "Daniel has sat down and rethought all the cliches and tropes of
nanotech, solar system colonization, interplanetary war,
intelligence extension and a dozen other SF fascinations. The
result is a book that is remarkably fresh and alluring, yet one
which deliberately speaks to the past work... of major authors,
continuing that tradition of cross-generational dialogue for which
SF is justifiably famous...
Readers, beware! Complex, sprawling and fascinating as
Metaplanetary is, the book is only the first in a series, and its
cliffhanger ending might frustrate." Actually, with Paul's warning, you'll be fine -- Metaplanetary ends at
a logical place to pause, though it may be some time before Part 2,
Superluminal, appears, dammit. Cliff-hanger or no, this is the best
book I've read this year, and perhaps since Vernor Vinge's epic A
Deepness in the Sky. Folks, this is the Good Hard Stuff. Unless you're
absolutely firm about reading the complete story at once -- get thee to
the bookstore! Author Daniel provides some sweet background information at his
websites: "I wrote down every cool science fiction idea I'd had in the last ten
years and began to work them together to produce my setting -- the
solar system as it would appear in 3013 A.D. My main ingredients were
advances in nanotechnology and physics and, on the cultural side, a combining of Eastern and Western philosophies into one spiritual
system..." -- Tony Daniel (minor SPOILERS, at metaplanetary.com) review copyright 2001 by Peter D. Tillman
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