Benford, Gregory. Tides of Light. Galactic Center No. 4. Bantam, 1989.
The collaboration between Gregory Benford and Larry Niven on The Bowl of Heaven in 2012 sparked a discussion between them about the differences between Big Dumb Objects and what they wanted to call the alien object they were building, a Big Smart Object. Benford might have mentioned that in Tides of Light, he had already created several BSOs. If you like epic-scale hard scifi, you can’t do much better than Benford. Tides of Light is a direct sequel to Great Sky River. The Bishop family has escaped from the mechs on Snowglade and reached the preprogrammed destination in their ancient spacecraft. There they find another band of human refugees, a race of cyborg-like aliens, and the Big Smart Objects. If, by some chance, this is your first Galactic Center novel, you might do well to read the chronology at the end first. One big idea here is that it is not always easy to distinguish between life and other varieties of intelligence. ( )

This is an immediate sequel -- well, two years have passed, but not too eventfully -- to Great Sky River, with the same characters, but back to Benford's interplanetary comfort zone. It continues the tone and structure of the previous novel surprisingly well, given the dramatic change in canvas. As before, there is a message literally out of the blue from the magnetic entity that is annoyingly human sounding, but this time the plot effects are not so pulp-ishly broad. As before, Benford has to explain absolutely everything. This time, our heroes have to contend not only with the mech super-civilization but super-intelligent cyber-spiders, a cosmic string planet slicer, and, eventually, a space "tree" 1000s of miles long. Benford just barely manages to hold everything in place for the story to flow along, but can't avoid having everything eventually depend on a major piece of fortuitous timing.

Despite the cyber-spiders and space tree, this is one of Benford's better books. A worthy sequel and recommended to fans of far-fetched space opera. ( )

http://yet.org/2009/02/marees_de_lumiere.html ( )

Ciclo del Centro Galactico IV