Vast

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and intriguing.
Review: The author does an excellent job balancing narritive with the information needed to understand this strange future. I also recommend Robert Doherty's THE ROCK for those looking for sci-fi with action.

Rating:
Summary: The only book I've bought good enough to review
Review: This book is well pretty close to perfect, although not for everybody. The prose is sparse smart and literate as well as being communicated in a number of styles from the truly obtuse alien lingo to the raygun space opera type of thing. The novel makes allusions to several human myths and paradoxes, some of which are stated by other reviewers. The thing that's great about this book is it's assumption that you, the reader, are bright enough to figure out what's going on. It drops you in very foregin territory and gets you thinking about the what ifs of science - basically it made me remember why I love science fiction when it's good. But if you prefer bad "hacker" signifying as related in many "cyberpunk" novels it won't be your cup of tea. However, it isn't a slow read if you enjoy a good solid piece of fiction and it begs you to think about it even when you've put it down. It's subtltey has stayed with me as I think about it - the main complaint I've heard is in many ways the point of the book - that the characters are less real than the artifacts of their short existence, and that evolution most times is about divergence. Read it.

Rating:
Summary: The only book I've bought good enough to review
Review: This book is well pretty close to perfect, although not for everybody. The prose is sparse smart and literate as well as being communicated in a number of styles from the truly obtuse alien lingo to the raygun space opera type of thing. The novel makes allusions to several human myths and paradoxes, some of which are stated by other reviewers. The thing that's great about this book is it's assumption that you, the reader, are bright enough to figure out what's going on. It drops you in very foregin territory and gets you thinking about the what ifs of science - basically it made me remember why I love science fiction when it's good. But if you prefer bad "hacker" signifying as related in many "cyberpunk" novels it won't be your cup of tea. However, it isn't a slow read if you enjoy a good solid piece of fiction and it begs you to think about it even when you've put it down. It's subtltey has stayed with me as I think about it - the main complaint I've heard is in many ways the point of the book - that the characters are less real than the artifacts of their short existence, and that evolution most times is about divergence. Read it.

Rating:
Summary: A Mixed Bag.
Review: Tres bizarre, non? I gave this novel 3 stars because it's intent is good but the delivery does not convince. We are dropped into a universe thousands of years into the future where Heraclitus has won over Parmenides. Through technology, everything is mutable and multiplicity is rampant. The human race has split into separate species which bear little relation to us and hence it was hard for me find them compelling or at all interesting. Nagata's universe is like a hugh VR Matrix where physical laws are options not givens. The science borders on implausible. The story is set against a backdrop of an several million year old civil war between the shipbuilders and the cult virus creators. The former wishes to destroy the other outright, the other destroys by assimilation and transformation. But who the hell are these ancient aliens? What the hell is the cult? Why the war? The answers are so steaped in time that the Chenzeme may not have existed in the first place. The book carries the protagonists who were created in the first book "Deception Well," on a centuries old journey to discover the origin of the cult and the Chenzeme. We are left at the end of the book even more confused and disappointed than at the start. In between, the characters flow in and out of corporeality, transferring themselves into ghosts or downloading themselves into neural nets or accompanying others in their atria or duplicating themselves so that there are hundreds of copies of them lying around the galaxy. The future of the human species may be even more bizarre than the human-alien hybrids of "Vast" as we learn to create designer organisms and Nagata gives you a feeling of this strangeness. However it makes for an abstract and sterile read, I'm afraid. She is an excellent technician but somehow I feel she has not grasped what it is to be human in the first place. All the characters she creates are like symbols pointing to other symbols rather than people with subtlty and substance. It is really too bad for the conception of the books is brilliant whereas the execution is taudry.