Looking for a really superb space opera complete with fascinating characters, a complex back story, and a truly great story? And I do mean George R.R. Martin long as there’s over twenty two hours of story here. Fortunately it’s a story that works very well as a listening experience.
This series skips the inherent problem of near future sf by being millennia in the future after humanity has spread out and colonized a fair volume of space around Earth. Most of the action is focused around several star systems with tens of thousands of orbiting habitats, planetary civilizations, beanstalks, slower than light space travel, and one Really Big Bad Extinction Level Threat. Oh and it avoids the Star Trek and Babylon 5 problem of most events only being a few millennia old by dealing in really long spans of history.
This novel is the first of five in this series, call it a hundred hours of story in total running time, leads off off this series with a Hell of a story. Nine hundred thousand years ago, something caused the extinction of an alien civilization where a human team’s studying their archaeological remains. Though they are unaware of it, their very activities are awakening billion year-old weapons gone awry from a war that long ago and these machines now think all star traveling species should been eliminated. Points for recognizing the irony of this imperative.
If it wasn’t bad enough that this Really Big Bad Extinction Level Threat is going to happen really soon, humanity itself has effectively become fractured into radically different groups including the Cojoiners, a technologically connected species that is a group mind, and the Ultras who’ve adapted themselves for living only in spaceships to the point they can never go anywhere that has gravity close to ours. And horse factions are in open war against each other.
The characters are well thought out, the story threads all come together, and the stage is set for the following eighty hours of this excellent space opera.
( Tantor Audio, 2009)
