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Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War
Unavailable
Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War
Unavailable
Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War
Ebook710 pages10 hours

Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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Free download! Peruse "The Metaplanetary Gazetteer," created by the author especially for this PerfectBound e-book.

Once or twice in a score of years, the boundlessly inventive realm of speculative fiction reveals a vision of tomorrow that dwarfs everything that came before. These are the dreams of the Asimovs and the Heinleins, the Bears and the Brins. Now Tony Daniel brilliantly dreams the future -- and reinvents humanity itself -- in an epic chronicle of civil war and transcendence that plays out on an enormous stage encompassing the solar system in its entirety -- its asteroids, its comets, and all its people, transmuted into astounding forms and living astonishing lives.

Metaplanetary

The human race has extended itself into the far reaches of our solar system -- and, in doing so, has developed into something remarkable and diverse and perhaps transcendent. The inner system of the Met -- with its worlds connected by a vast living network of cables -- is supported by the repression and enslavement of humanity's progeny, nanotechnological artificial intelligences -- beings whom the tyrant Amés has declared non-human. There is tolerance and sanctuary in the outer system beyond the Jovian frontier. Yet few of the oppressed ever make it post the dictator's well-patrolled boundaries.

But the longing for freedom cannot be denied, whatever the risk.A priest of the mystical religion called the Greentree Way senses catastrophe approaching. A vision foretells that the future of our bitterly divided solar system rests in the hands of a mysterious man of destiny and doom who has vanished into the backwater of the Met in search of his lost love. But the priest is not the only one who grasps this man's importance. The despot Am$eacute;s is after the some quarry -- and until now there has been no power in the inner solar system willing to oppose Amés and his fearsome minions.

But now a line has been drawn of Neptune's moon Triton. Roger Sherman, a retired military commander from Earth's West Point and a Greentree ally, will not let Amés prevail. Though dwarfed by the strength and wealth of the Met, the cosmos under Sherman's jurisdiction will remain free at all cost -- though defiance will ensure the unspeakable onslaught of the dictator Amés's wrath -- a rage that will soon ravage the solar system. A rage that will plunge all of humankind into the fury of total war.

With Metaplanetary, author Tony Daniel fulfills the great promise of his critically acclaimed earlier works. A new master has reached for the stars, with a stunning speculative masterwork of enormous scope and conceptual daring -- an adventure of grand victories and horrific villainy, both human and meta-human alike.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateOct 13, 2009
ISBN9780061826733
Unavailable
Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War
Author

Tony Daniel

Tony Daniel is a science fiction writer and author of Star Trek: The Original Series: Devil’s Bargain, Guardian of Night, Metaplanetary, Superluminal, Earthling, Warpath, and short stories such as “A Dry, Quiet War.” With David Drake, he is the author of The Heretic and The Savior. He is also an editor at Baen Books. He’s had multiple stories in Year’s Best anthologies, one of which, “Life on the Moon,” won the Asimov’s Reader’s Poll Award for year’s best story and was nominated for a Hugo Award.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I enjoyed this book despite the plethora of characters. The author kept introducing characters and multiplying the plotlines making the scope of the book enormous. Then he finished just as things were starting to draw together.Now I have to find an eBook of the second book for sale in Australia.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When I started this book I had no idea it would be the first of several, just that it was highly recommended.Daniel's potpourri of ideas is wonderfully stimulating. He can "do" deep enough characters when he wants to but he is oddly inconsistent with this skill. For example, we get a lovingly crafted background for Ames early in the novel and then his character is not much more than a 2-dimensional megalomaniac for the remainder. Worse than that, his sexual masochist nature is simply gone later in the book, perhaps twisted to sadism, with no explanation.Daniel has well-considered thoughts about a possible future virtuality, a staple of cyberpunk SF. His vision feels a bit fresher than most and I like how he combines faster-than-light quantum communication and a nanoscopic pervasive medium (grist). It feels like hard SF. I don't think he makes a convincing argument for the continuation of the biological aspect (literally uses that word) of entities that far into the future. Why be subject to the pains, frustrations, life span, and inefficiencies of the flesh if it is not necessary? We might not all be capable of being Large Array Personalities (combinations of multiple minds) but it would seem we're all capable of being converts (algorithmic or on-line representations of the self). Cloudships are a fine alternative but why have a meat body at all?Perhaps Daniel is portraying a time between meat and no-meat but, for me, the existence of cloudships pushes that credibility too far. Oh, it was intensely useful as a plot device, where some meat-and-virtual people are bigoted against virtual-only copies or evolutions of copies.I loved his exploration of a family where the husband was meat, wife was purely virtual, and the children are hybrids. And he gave quite chilling accounts of how a virtual entity could be tortured, raped, or damaged. And even a concentration camp-like setting complete with a Dr. Mengele type. Okay, he was clearly having too much fun with the cliche there (or torturing metaphors, lol).Where the book falls down is in having too many threads either not followed or badly dangling. Some of this is clearly leading to the next book, Superluminary, which I will have to read. But it also feels WAY choppier than necessary. He gets us to care about a character or induce a curiosity about another and then... nothing.Then there is the whole plot thread of the time tower LAP's and one special LAP. The book was a bit too cryptic in this area. Heck , a huge part of it supposedly revolves around that special time-LAP, how he not only sees the future but affects the present... with almost no visible effect on this book's plot (aside from, possibly, being why Jill came to exist)!Some of this was very frustrating and brings jarring discontinuities to an otherwise 5-star book.Maybe Daniel can make it up to me with future books.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The first thing that you should know before picking up this book is that it isn’t a stand-alone novel. It is the first book of a trilogy. The second book is called “Superluminary.” The third book is called… well I don’t know what it’s called. Eos apparently declined to pay Mr. Daniel to write the third book, so he understandably hasn’t. This is a shame on many levels. This could have been (and hopefully perhaps one day will be) a science fiction epic that might have stood the test of time. The closest comparison to this book that I have read recently is Peter Hamilton’s “Pandora’s Star” and “Judas Unchained” duology. This book is filled with hard SF and questions of how humanity will move into the future. It doesn’t deal with the singularity at all, but deals impressively with questions of how we will cope when human personalities are no longer confined to their individual bodies. In this book we meet humans who primarily reside in their physical bodies, but with a cloud of nanites (called “grist”) to help them with memory and computations. We meet humans who have distributed their personalities between many bodies and the omnipresent grist and are called “Large Array Personalities” or LAPs. There are people who exist only in the grist and are called “free converts” and then the children of “normal” people and free converts who are “half-converts.” And let’s not forget the cloudships! We meet a huge cast of characters in this, and start many plot lines. None of them are resolved, as one would expect. Basically, the dictator Amés is starting a war between all the factions of the solar system. His ultimate goal involves uniting all the human personalities existing under one rule: his. To this end he is particularly interested in enslaving all the free converts. The descriptions of his concentration camps and their Mengele-type experiments aren’t particularly violent, but they are very disturbing. We also learn the stories of himself, his victims and his opponents, with lots of hard-SF world building and history. This is exactly my sort of thing, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I will read “Superluminary,” and then I will join the ranks of those who are really annoyed at Eos for not funding the conclusion of this amazing epic of science fiction.