Do You like book Newton's Wake: A Space Opera (2005)?
'Where is here, anyway?''We call the planet Eurydice. The star — we don't have a name for it. We know it is in the Sagittarius Arm.’'No shit!' Carlyle grinned with unfeigned delight. 'We didn't know the skein stretched this far.''Skein?'She waved her hands. 'That wormhole, it's linked to lots of others in a sort of messy tangle.'He stared at her' his teeth playing on his lower lip.'And you and your colleagues came here through the wormhole?''Of course.' She wrapped her arms around herself while the thermal elements in the undersuit warmed up. 'You didn't know this was a gate?'Armand shook his head. 'We've always kept clear of the alien structure' for reasons which should be obvious, but apparently are not.' He pointed a finger; the sweep of his hand indicated the horizon, and the hilltop henges. 'We took the circle of megaliths to be a boundary indicator, left by the indigenes. Today is the first time in a century that anyone has set foot within it. We keep it under continuous surveillance, of course, which is why your intrusion was detected. That and the signal burst. It went off like a goddamn nuclear EMP, but that's the least of the damage.' He glared at her. 'Something for which you will pay, whoever you are. What did you say you were?''The Carlyles,' she reiterated, proudly and firmly.'And who're they, when they're at home?'She was unfamiliar with the idiom. 'We're at home everywhere,' she said. 'People have a name for the wormhole skein. They call it Carlyle's Drift.'This is an enjoyable space opera, but overall I found it a bit confusing. There is a lot going on and things like the political differences between the Returners and Reformers were never explained clearly enough. The implications of backing yourself up on a regular basis so that you could be resurrected if you died were touched upon, but never resolved. Now as she sat in the monorail shuttle facing the Armands and holding her knees together to stop their trembling, she felt the same horror. James Winter and Alan Calder were not uploads or downloads, or even resurrectees. They had prosthetic personalities. They had false memories. Without reliable human memory there could be no identity, no continuity, no humanity. The idea affected her like motion sickness. Although Lucinda was panicked when she discovered that Winter and Calder had been resurrected from the little that remained of their brains after they died in a car crash with their missing memories reconstructed from information about them that was held on computer, she soon convinced herself that there wasn't any problem after all. Even though when the resurrected Lucinda read a letter her dying self had written to her, she could tell that the original Lucinda was different, having been changed by the experiences she underwent after her last back-up.The conclusion appears to be that 'memories maketh the man'. If you see yourself as a person then you are one, whether you are alive for the first time or have been resurrected from a back-up, whether you are a back-up of a real person living in a virtual reality, or a construct of a human being living in that same virtual reality. But in my opinion, although Lucinda #2 may think she is the same person as Lucinda #1, seeing them both as one continuous Lucinda, Lucinda #1 is dead and gone, to an afterlife, reincarnation or nothingness. There is no continuity of Lucinda-consciousness for her.Don't you find it annoying when the person who wrote the back cover blurb has obviously not read the book. "Lucinda Carlyle, head of an ambitious clan of galactic entrepreneurs, had carved out a profitable niche for herself and her kin by taking control of the Skein, a chain of interplanetary star-gates left behind by the posthumans. But on a world called Eurydice, a remote planet at the farthest rim of the galaxy, Lucinda stumbled upon a forgotten relic of the past that could threaten her way of life." If they had read even the first chapter, they would have known that Lucinda is not the head of the Carlyles; she is a youngster of 24 and the mission to Eurydice is her first as team leader of a squad of combat archaeologists.
—Isabel (kittiwake)
MacLeod's space opera follows nowadays common threat: the humanity is out there in the space and possesses wondrous technology which it does not fully understand and doesn't even put this understanding very high on its list of future goals. So the humanity stumbles on in an eternal struggle between its various factions a little bit afraid what might lay ahead and some what concerned about what it has created in the past.So the story follows the many factions of humanity, the ones that were left behind and the ones that departed when the humanity's creation last reached singularity resulting in the machine/AI/technological uprising seemingly seen as almost inevitable by so many SF writers. When the dust finally settled over Earth, the surviving descendants of those that didn't originally own an escape pod surged into space themselves only to start squabbling over the technology they found. Now headed by the faction most specialized in pillaging, they have finally catch up with the ones who left earlier, who just happen to live on a planet with hugely potential technological cache.Newton's wake is an entertaining novel. While the story itself doesn't offer any radically new ideas, it manages to combine many of them readable package. However, at times it feels like MacLeod has concentrated on the entertainment a bit too much. This is very much a space opera/comedy. On the whole MacLeod manages to keep the screwball-elements in check, but his effort to get laughs often get the better of him. The novel is filled with gags, jokes and pop-cultural references that sometimes seem a bit underlined (nudge, nudge, you get it, right?). Sometimes it seems that the writer was more interested in delivering a vessel for his jokes than building any kind of a reasonable future. For example, the factions seem to be something ripped straight out of a computer strategy game: at best of times like from Alpha Centauri/Civilisation -style game at worst from a Command & Conquer-branch. Some more thought could have raided the bar a bit.However, I did love the use of Scottish accent.
—Jani
The book was good, but not great. The problem seemed to be that it wanted to be a Big Ideas Action Adventure /and/ a satirical comedy, and didn't quite pull either off very well.One character had most of the laughs, Ben Ami a playwright who styled himself after Shakespeare and produced amusingly awful plays that were still inexplicably popular. We hear references to plays such as "The Madness of George II, President of America" and his reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet that used genuine anti-aircraft guns which were a devil to insure. Unfortunately his “Leonid Brezhnev, Prince of Moscovy” is a little too good and sparks off a civil war amongst some Koreans, which is very distracting while he is trying to get permission to resurrect a couple of Scottish rockers for a “come-back” concert. The other plotline follows Lucinda, a “Combat Archaeologist”, her job is to pass through wormholes to investigate ruins that are probably guarded by hyper-technology war machines in the hope of retrieving useful technology. In one such expedition (to Ben Ami's world) she accidently awakens a vast army of war machines. This character has her funny moments, but the plotline is decidedly not funny. I can say this with confidence because, aside from anything else I find it hard to imagine a plotline in which characters die from radiation sickness even slightly amusing. This is the problem, both plots are OK, but it's the jumping between two totally different styles of story that really took the wind out of things. Just as I started rooting for Lucinda in her life and death struggle, I was treated to three pages of satirical chuckles at Brezhnev's expense. Then as I was just getting into the antics of the fish-out-of-water Scottish singers, suddenly we were back with Lucinda seeing a burnt out village with murdered children. I'd say, good ideas, not so good in practice. If you liked the ideas I'd say read one of the following instead:Strata by Terry Pratchett for the SF comedyMoving Pictures by Terry Pratchett for the funny playwright (and a thousand elephants!)Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton for the action adventure and wormholesFire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge for AIs and ancient threats awakenedThis book wasn't bad, but all of the above are way better.
—William
