From Publishers Weekly
Nebula-finalist Metzger (Picoverse) delivers a concept-crammed entry in the SF subgenre of hard space opera. In 2031, the Sun and the Earth sprout high-energy jet exhausts, relics of alien technology triggered by humanity's technology. Trying to maintain order, the Powers (That Be) seek to understand and control the planet-girdling rings created by the exhausts. Biocybernetic humans called Tools, like Simon Ryan, work with unenhanced Pures, like Gen. Thomas Sutherland, to go past "the Point," the shift from human to posthuman superbeings. Sutherland's plans are threatened by the intervention of a host of entities, including some pig-farming Tools, a sentient Internet "ghost," a Muslim U.S. ambassador to Mars, reconstituted intelligent velociraptors and their hyper-evolved lemur rivals, and Simon's cyber assistant, Bill Gates. But Sutherland plans very deeply, 65 million years' worth of deep, and is willing to sacrifice his daughter, Sarah, to achieve success. Metzger tosses theories around like tennis balls and does the same with planets and solar systems, leading to a literal star-smashing climax. Readers who appreciate the outer edges of science, and regular trips past it, may not mind the sudden shifts of viewpoint and the tendency of supersmart characters not to pick up on the obvious.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist
Metzger, a regular contributor to Wired and a Nebula nominee for the novel Picoverse (2002), launches his latest from an astonishing premise. A solar flare shifts the position of the sun and mysteriously provokes the eruption on Earth of two mammoth rings--one circling the equator; the other, the poles. In the aftermath of this cataclysm, a vastly diminished global community reorganizes into strictly defined genetic classes and plugs itself into a nearly infinite cyberspace realm called the Void. The story that follows these arrangements concerns the intertwined destinies of a father and his daughter trying to avoid fieldwork conscription by trolling the Void, and a genetically modified programmer hoping to make the evolutionary leap to a posthuman identity. Yet an enigmatic entity dwelling in the Void may have its own plans for human evolution via a supercomputer known as CUSP, which runs on the "software" of the human mind. Metzger's background as a telecommunications scientist enables a brilliant, sprawling vision of humanity in the late-twenty-first century. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
