This is an expanded review which recently appeared on Amazon
that, at the time of writing (30th May, 2012) earned 28 positive
votes out of 30 (28/30) which is quite a large number by my usual standards
–anything over 10 votes is exceptional. Mind you, it was the first Amazon UK
review of the book and being the first gets more attention. (The book itself I got for free, a proof copy for review without the snazzy cover shown above.) I think it’s
possibly because, having seen a specific criticism on amazon.com, I opened the
review with my argument against said criticism. I’ve revised it for this blog
because I wanted to go into a little more detail.
The 4 star review’s title is: Enjoyable far future adventure.
That's 12,000 years plus in the future without any back to
the Stone Age disasters in between. This immediately sets up the argument that such a period of development would
create a society incomprehensible to modern man. I disagree for a couple of
reasons. The first is that we are already technologically advanced and just
because we can't understand how something futuristic works doesn't mean we
don't recognise it for what it is i.e. the product of science.
Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, or in words to this effect,
that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This
sounds a clever thing to say when he said it decades ago but looking at it now
it just sounds glib. It doesn't look like magic to our eyes, it just looks like
technology. Having second thoughts, I don’t think it was a clever thing to say
even then, it just sounded clever and, coming from the great man himself, it
gained a lot of attention. I’m not being facetious here. Clarke is important in
the history of science fiction and in populist writing about science. He was
a genuinely creative thinker. But in this case he was wrong by, at the very
least, a couple of hundred years and probably more.
The Renaissance brought about a great change in the way we
saw the world, in particular that we are just a part of the universe and not
the centre. For the next few hundred years, we saw the evolution in thinking
about what call Science which exploded with the Industrial Revolution. A
reasonably educated mid-Victorian would not be shocked or overwhelmed by
contemporary technology once s/he’d had a change to take it all in. The changes
in society would be far more overwhelming.
The second reason is that, while it goes without saying that
society will be vastly different in the future, it's unlikely that our basic
intelligence will have changed much. 12,000 years is a blink on the
evolutionary scale and I don’t think that it’s altered significantly since the
invention of writing and probably longer. Of course there’s always the
possibility our intelligence could be enhanced by genetic advances but I’m not
going to go there. My argument is that society a few thousand years in the
future may be strange to our eyes but it won’t
be incomprehensible.
What Roberson does is to create and deftly portray to the
reader just such an advanced society as seen through the eyes of an astronaut
born a couple of centuries hence. The first half is concerned with our hero RJ
finding his way in the new world and the second with his command of the first
ever FTL spaceship. I should note that thousands of worlds have been populated
by means of (wormhole powered gates and getting from one world to another is as
easy as walking through a door. There's a varied collection of supporting
characters, some human, some A1, some enhanced animals (including cats, dogs,
chimpanzees and killer whales), but all intelligences are considered by society
to be human. Except by...
Which is where the conflict comes in and the novel climaxes
with an encounter with the 'except by'. It's all very readable and a promising
start to this new trilogy. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the next
one.
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