Rating: 
Summary: Awesome Book!
Review: Was very pleasantly surprised by this book which I borrowed, not expecting much. Wow! Great setting, interesting characters and not predictable at all. Great action and the possibilities for future stories seem endless.
Rating: 
Summary: Good story, but not great
Review: What this is: Space Opera from the late 1990s similar to: Simon Green's "Deathstalker" series (but not nearly as violent or as "cheesy"), Iain Banks "Culture" novels (but not nearly as meanspirited). They have "borrowed" some ideas by Vernor Vinge and some others from Heinline (reaching way back to the late 50s there). It is an enjoyable mix and I had no trouble blazing through the book. However, it doesn't really have an original idea. The AI here is simply too powerful (I'm a Vinge fan and to me, really powerful AIs are scary). And, just about everyone we meet is too "nice". Even the nasty types that we meet at the end of the book are just doing their job, and they aren't that nasty either. I will grant that the authors have done a good job of "universe" creation. Nothing that grabs you while you say "wow!" but still, not bad at all. There are better books out there (especially "A Fire Upon the Deep") but there are also a large number of worse books. I'm certainly willing to try out book 2.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps paced a little too fast, but still enjoyable
Review: Williams and Dix deliver us into a universe many millennia in our own future, where homo sapiens sapiens has speciated into several distinct Castes. Indeed, sometimes the speciation has gone far enough that to us, these new varieties of humanity would seem more alien than human. After learning there really wasn't anyone else out there, humankind has come to rule the stars--but traditional human rivalry is never far below the surface.
Tensions have run high since the Dato Bloc's secession from the Commonwealth of Empires (COE). Morgan Roche is a COE intelligence agent on a mission to deliver a powerful Artificial Intelligence unit to her superiors. When her ship comes under attack and she is forced to crash-land on a barren planet with a handful of survivors, her job becomes that much more difficult.
Williams and Dix are two of Australia's newer science fiction talents. This series marks their American debut, and whilst their prose is never particularly evocative, the plot certainly runs along at a fair clip. The absence of any truly "evil" characters also lends the opening book an interesting air of ambiguity. Who should win? Why? Whose side are we supposed to be on?
If I could, I'd give this book four and a half stars. There are just too many missed opportunities for the book to rate five. But what *is* here is good enough for a lazy summer afternoon, or a couple of days on a road trip. The book is short, there's little meandering, and the characters grow throughout the book (albeit sometimes in a rather facile fashion). Even the enigmatic Adoni Cane seems to have the glimmers of a personality by the time the book ends. However, we are rarely afforded the time to see a character grow subtly--the changes are shoved at us via internal monologues or overt auctorial influence.
If you're a fan of space opera, definitely give this one a try. If, on the other hand, you find space opera trite, and prefer something more like _A Fire Upon the Deep_, then you might want to give it a miss.
I guess, in the end, it's something like the literary equivalent of fast food. You'll love it while you're reading it, but when you're done you might want something more.
Rating:
Summary: A lighthearted space adventure
Review: Williams and Dix do a superb job with the opening book to their Evergence trilogy. This story involves Morgan Roche, an intelligence operative for the Commonwealth of Empires, a sort of conglomeration of solar systems that agree to have the same government. Roche's mission is to escort a super-AI known as the Box to Commonwealth Intelligence HQ. Everything begins to go wrong, however, when the ship she is on (the Midnight) is ambushed by Dato Bloc (another government) forces. Roche, with the help of the Box, bucks the odds by surviving the attack and escaping the Midnight in a small pod. Along the way, she enlists the help of Adoni Cane, a seemingly normal human with some very superhuman capabilities. While her "partners" all seem very willing to help, several strange facts come to the forefront, and Morgan begins to wonder what her "friends" might secretly think. Who, really, is Adoni Cane? And what does the Box really want? Read the book and find out!
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