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With nods to Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series and the real science of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, a touch of Hugh Howey's Wool, and echoes of Octavia Butler's voice, a powerful tale of space travel, adventure, discovery, and humanity that unfolds through a series of generational vignettes. In 2088, humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth's solar system. But one uncertainty remains: Where do we go? Astrophysicist Reggie Straifer has an idea. He's discovered an anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics, and proposes the creation of a deep-space mission to find out whether the star is a weird natural phenomenon, or something manufactured. The journey will take eons. In order to maintain the genetic talent of the original crew, humankind's greatest ambition--to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy-- is undertaken by clones. But a clone is not a perfect copy, and each new generation has its own quirks, desires, and neuroses. As the centuries fly by, the society living aboard the nine ships (designated Convoy Seven) changes and evolves, but their mission remains the same: to reach Reggie's mysterious star and explore its origins--and implications. A mosaic novel of discovery, Noumenon--in a series of vignettes--examines the dedication, adventure, growth, and fear of having your entire world consist of nine ships in the vacuum of space. The men and women, and even the AI, must learn to work and live together in harmony, as their original DNA is continuously replicated and they are born again and again into a thousand new lives. With the stars their home and the unknown their destination, they are on a voyage of many lifetimes--an odyssey to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge and imagination.… (more)
User reviews
In 2088, humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth’s solar system. But one uncertainty remains: Where do we go?
A post scarcity Earth decides to send out expeditions to explore the universe, this book follows the
I found the questions posed by this concept to be fascinating and I was really curious to see how or even if, the author addressed all of them. While I didn’t always agree with the authors conclusions, she did seem to have at least touched on just about all of them so that made me happy.
Each chapter deals with a different span of time in the course of the journey and from a different characters point of view each time. I found this worked really well for showing how the culture of the convey changed over time without getting to bogged down by too much back story, but it did make it confusing to keep track of who the characters were since they were all clones of the original crew and for the most part used the same names.
For positives, I thought the world building, science and seeing how the choices made before the convoy even left Earth both changed and had ongoing impact on everything that came after, especially enjoyed seeing how a closed society can and will grow and evolve.
For negatives, it was a little hard to get attached to many of the characters, with each chapter and time jump the names and many of the personalities seemed to stay they same even though I knew they were different people and I had trouble keeping who was who straight at times.
And towards the end there were a few chapters felt as though they went on a bit too long which caused the story to drag a bit.
These issues aside, I did really enjoy this book and found myself really excited with each chapter to see how things were going to change with each jump forward and I will be watching out for this author going forward.
This sounds like it might get confusing. It's not. The novel progresses through a series of long short stories or novelettes; some feature complete arcs and can stand on their own (one chapter is published in a new Baen Memorial Award anthology), but overall, they flow together to create a comprehensive novel that skips decades and even centuries.
Honestly, I'm usually turned off by books or series that span generations. It disturbs me to become fond of young characters and then watch them die of old age. For some reason, that wasn't an issue here--perhaps because of the nature of clones? I did become attached to the character of Jamal, which just about broke my heart at a few points, but I like how Lostetter developed his line through the end and how the ship's sentient AI played a role.
In all, this is a very different kind of sci-fi novel because it twists around so many familiar tropes in inventive new ways.
As someone who prefers poetry over
In his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov is quite good at pointing out the need to redraw our maps and drop our assumptions. The gist of what he says is that every time we open a novel we are visiting a new potential world, very different from our own ideas about our own world, and we will be sorely misguided unless we redraw our maps and learn to see difference everywhere.
Finally, I must admit that I am drawn to speculative fiction for its decadent, art-for-art's sake aspects. Because I studied Victorian poetry, it reminds of me of Swinburne's urgent lesson. It matters not whether the art deals with Past or Present or Future or something apparently unknown. Instead, what matters is the excellence of the writing, the breadth of the imagination.
You might think what does a Generation Spaceship Novel Using Almost All of the Tropes of Vintage SF has got to do with locating the “real world”? Ah. That’s the beauty of Lostetter’s approach. Who would have thought we would get SF like this in 2018 (the year I read it)? For starters, the Generation Spaceship Novels of Old I read them all. Off the top of my head: “Book of the Long Sun”, “The Ballad of Beta-2”, “Tau Zero”, “Orphans of the Sky”, “Eon”, “Eternity”, “Cities in Flight”, “Rendezvous with Rama”, etc. What does “Noumenon” bring to the table? It tells the story through several vignettes; their use was a clever idea, because Lostetter didn’t go for the easy way out by using a Sleeper G-Ship. By using the AI I.C.C. in all of the vignettes we’ve got a continuity between them. Strangely, no religion and no ethical considerations which in terms of world-building diminished the returns of the novel. Also and unfortunately, the Physics of space travel (“subdimensional spacetime”) had a fluffy feeling. I’d like to have had a bit of substance when it came to exploring the SD device. I could see what Lostetter was doing by concentrating on the human aspects rather than on the more hard stuff. I just like my SF with more meat…the cloning idea was also superb, but was not fully explored. I hear there’s a sequel. Maybe Lostetter is saving digging deeper for later. I’m not sure whether Lostetter can deliver the goods.
In a SFional milieu it’s much more difficult to come up with an independent source of ethical behaviour (humans vs clones). The ethical bodies simply reflect society rather than a scientific basis for ethical behaviour. Science says “How”. Philosophy and Religion say “Why”. “How does this work?” and “Therefore how shall I behave?” are not in the same field. You have to be outside of the system to understand the system. A human clone would be a perfect subject for notions about humans having a divine spirit which, according to some, materializes at conception. Of course, no one has proved that regular humans have this attribute, but what fun it would have been if Lostetter had gone down that particular road. We as part of the Hominid spectrum, are especially inventive and intuitive. What if, possibly, just envisage...that potentially humankind, might be the first wave of intelligence in the galaxy. Or potentially, we may be the remnants of a far more ancient intellect. The point being, cloning is just another jewel in our crown. Nothing, upsets me, astonishes me, adores me, hates me, tantalises me more...than the human condition in a SF novel. We admonish ourselves too heartily, we should really focus on our extreme and very poetic brilliance. The tapestry of mankind, is forever the Cosmos, we exist to explore it, to be beguiled by it, hopefully one day to come to a relative understanding of it. Do not fear cloning, embrace it, as just another beautiful aspect of our species genius.
Alas, we can’t have everything…3 stars for the mighty effort.
This story, in addition to the generation ship theme, also included elements of cloning, artificial intelligence and hard science fiction pertaining to near light speed travel and Dyson sphere technology. This was all presented in a series of vignettes, arranged chronologically, most aboard the generation ship.
All in all, it was pretty run of the mill science fiction, though there were a couple of vignettes that I really didn’t care for. Some of the dialogue was painfully bad.
I'll never understand publishers' insistence on building up expectations for a book by comparing it to legends (and then bypassing the obvious comparison that would be Tau Zero in this case).
First fumbling block for me with this book was the writing. I can't pin point what it is, but the
The book handled some really interesting concepts from cloning as procreation to (anthropomorphized) AI to time dilation to the stages a closed society goes through during centuries in deep the space. Oddly enough, this book also had me in tears a couple of times, which gives it bonus points.
The development of the humans on Earth during the couple millennia between launch and re-entry was at first interesting, but in the end somewhat disappointing. I feel like the author could have done that more cleanly, as now it just felt somehow hurried and underdeveloped. But still, not bad. (The language of the current Earthlings was a little ehhh, though.)
I wish the book would have focused more on the focus of the journey and what they found, but I guess that's what we have the second book for.
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Re-read 03/2021 in preparation for the third part. Still a solid four star.
Then there is the "sci"-fi part of this. This fails in so many small ways. I have my own "theories" of sci-fi (don't explain the tech, fail in one big way because people will just build the universe around that, etc.) This book shows why. Attempts are made right and left to say in throw-off ways how stuff works, and it fails. E.g. they need long-term storage of information that is incorruptible. The solution? Single copies stored on DNA... so that even low levels of ionizing radiation corrupt it, or reading the DNA destroys it (which seems to be a misunderstanding/translation of what happens inside biological DNA systems...) Why not store the information in a more durable format? Or store a billion copies in DNA? Or store the information in multiple locations?
Finally, there is just too much here. The episodic/generational storytelling doesn't work here because there is too much. I think (well, clearly) the author was trying to get into the evolution (or, perhaps, chaotic development) of societies, but... it's just not executed well enough. We're the pinnacle of social evolution (...including being genetically optimal.) Now we're deciding to filter out/genocide-lite "lines" of people because of mental illness, rebellion, suicide, etc. (Ok, so-far so-Nazi.) Now we have a slave society. Now we get rid of slavery, but we've got a (still genetically based) social hierarchy. Meanwhile, back on Earth, everyone is navel-gazing or entertained to death or just living their lives (its abundantly unclear) but has decided (and stayed decided, for like 2000 years), that nothing else is interesting other than their semi-uploaded reality... except that there is still a scarcity economy and something like mercantilism or maybe state capitalism around... coffee and chocolate (because terrorists blew up the seedbanks.)
WTF? Why stop there. Add some grey-goo, a religious cult, and a couple of kitchen sinks.
Actually, why am I giving this two stars? Mostly for my residual high hopes, I think.