Rafe, Jullian, and Paul are young friends trying to make their way in the universe with nothing but a junk ship on the frontiers of settled space. Rafe and Jullian are brother-sister, and Paul is Jullian’s husband. Despite all the risks, they have high hopes for their life together on the Lindy as they go out for months at a time on asteroid mining expeditions.
All of that changes, however, when an unidentified object leaves jumpspace and heads on a collision course with their ship. Before they know what’s happening, the object captures them and heads for deep space.
The human voyagers find themselves in a bizarre world where the boundaries between physical reality and virtual reality are blurred, and the very essence of humanity can be recorded, copied, duplicated, and even synthesized with other human and alien templates. As they fall deeper and deeper into an intership conflict that has come to a crest after a hundred thousand years, they find that their unique personalities and relationships with each other hold the key to their salvation…and their hidden secrets, their destruction.
This book was BIZARRE. Strangest sci fi novel I’ve read, and those of you who know me will know what that means! I’m left with the impression that it was a deep book, but I can’t exactly tell you how or why. Perhaps it’s because of the alien-ness of the alien, and the profound way that it impacted the characters and cut to the very core of who each of them were. Perhaps it’s because of the questions it raised about the nature of reality and how we define ourselves as human beings. This book touched on some deep issues in ways that I found quite disturbing.
The greatest strength of this book would have to be the way it penetrated these issues. Its greatest weakness grew out of that–the book was just incredibly confusing. I felt really disoriented when I was reading it. I never knew who or what the aliens were, what their motivation was, where the humans really were, what was really happening to them, or, at the climax, how…well, how things played out at the climax. Very confusing, even if it was fascinating.
At the same time, the confusion of their situation also helped the story to be very believable. I really hate reading about your stereotypical aliens–the guys who walk, talk, and act like humans, but have a different mask or hairstyle or something. These aliens felt like the real thing. They were bizarre, scary, had unbelievable technology, and, well, were just very alien. There was hardly anything about them that had any kind of reference to the way we, as human beings, see the world.
I almost wonder if this book has some cyberpunk undertones. I dunno…obviously, with the far future setting, it doesn’t fit into the cyberpunk genre. However, the idea of replicating human beings through a super computer raises some very interesting existential questions. Also, the fact that the aliens seem to inhabit a virtual world of the ship computer raises some interesting questions about how a cyber-existence warps our own ideas of consciousness.
It was a very well written piece, in a very interesting universe, with some moderately interesting characters and a bizarre, disturbing situation. At the same time, it’s definitely not for everyone. If you’re not the kind of person who reads much sci fi, you’re probably not going to appreciate this book. If, however, you enjoy the bizarre and disturbing, this is a book you will probably enjoy.
