Category: science-fiction

Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter

The opposite of “Phenomenon” apparently …

The trouble with eBooks is that it’s pretty difficult to judge how big they are. I picked up Noumenon and thought it was going to be a pretty average-sized science-fiction novel.

Well it wasn’t that. This book is epic. It was one of those book that felt like you’d been reading it for years. I don’t mean that in a bad way; the book was absolutely brilliant. It’s just that the pacing was so good, and the characters so well-defined, it felt like I was living every minute of the adventure.

Noumenon

Convoy Seven is a fleet of twelve ships dispatched from Earth in the middle of the 22nd century. The plan is to travel to a nearby star that, according to long-range scans, may be encased in an artificial structure (a Dyson Sphere, if you’re interested). As this is the first real possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy, the fleet, crewed by one hundred thousand clones of astronauts and scientists, is sent on a three hundred year round trip to investigate the star. And as if three centuries wasn’t long enough, due to space/time dilation caused by travelling faster than light; three thousand years will have passed on Earth by the time the convoy returns.

See? I said it was an epic.

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Rubicon by J.S. Dewes

Set in the far future, mankind is neck-deep in a galactic war with the Mechan: a race of hive-minded machines bent on preventing humanity from spreading any further than its dying solar system.

Fortunately (or perhaps not so fortunately), the military has developed a way of throwing endless resources at the conflicts: when a soldier is killed in action, their consciousness is downloaded into a cloned body, complete with their memories up until their point of death.

The hero of the story is Specialist Adrienne Valero, a soldier with a drink problem who has been resurrected an astonishing ninety-six times. Valero is transferred to a forward recon unit which is tasked within uncovering the motivation of the Mechan enemy and (hopefully) discovering a way to defeat them.

In my humble opinion, this was a pretty good book. It was very heavy on the technical detail, especially concerning the resurrection process which involves transmitting the deceased neurological makeup to space stations where they can be downloaded into cloned bodies. It reminded me of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom; after a while, you get the impression that immortality is not the panacea it’s cracked up to be.

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