Marina J. Lostetter

Noumenon is one of those stories that will bend your mind. A generation convoy sets off from Earth to uncover the meaning of a distant - possible artificial - star. The journey there and back will take 200 y using the ships' special sub-dimensional drives - or 2000 y from Earth's POV. The ships, once tethered from the Earth, form their own distinctive civilisation based around dedication to the sole cause of the ships, and maintain their population by genetic baking - cloning the original show more batch as soon as their predecessor dies to take over from them. Each person has a specific role, as will their "clone" and so on.

The book touches on many things, most notably of purpose. Each individual has a purpose, and each person is part of the whole. The book also touches on every part of any civilisation, from a mutiny that resolves in unintended consequences, to effective prison labour based on your genetic predecessors, and finally, First Contact with the most alien of species - our future. There's also more philosophical questions - like morality, and also what it is to be human - the ships' AI develops a personality and almost Human-like tendancies, whereas the future Humans have melded themselves INTO machines.

But my most favourite part of this book is one that very few sci-fi writers can do - end their book. Noumenon actually has a satisfying end that ties everything all together, while opening up for a sequel (hopefully!).

On the downside, Lostetter's worldbuilding is remarkable - since the entire "world" is literally seven ships and their crew, but lacking. In this society, were there no place for entertainment, like films and poetry? Did everyone just work and work? From a psychological POV, the society is fairly weak as a standalone entity, but it doesn't detract too much from the rest of the book.


I recommend this book for anyone who wants fast-thinking, easily accessible (despite the heavy concepts in the book, Lostetter describes it all with ease) sci-fi with touches of philosophy, economics, and human interest; buy this. Now. show less

This book was a good try, but not an actual success, in my opinion. Part of the problem is that the author just bit off a lot here, and part of it’s that the pieces of the book don’t quite fit together. Still, I found it mostly compelling reading, and I’ll go on to read the sequel, where I’m hoping experience will come to the author’s aid and help her produce a more functional book.

All the reviews of this said it was reminiscent of classic SF, and that is definitely true, but not show more — not how I thought they meant it, I guess. This book clearly shows the results of having read a lot of classic SF; I recognized the many references scattered in it, and it certainly has a lot of familiar elements. But it reads more like a pastiche than like an homage, because this book doesn’t try to do what classic SF did. It focuses on society rather than science; the big space object is a MacGuffin rather than the cool idea at the heart of the novel. And that’s not inherently a bad thing. I love cool ideas, but I also love skillful extrapolations of human society. It’s just that this — is not exceptionally skillful.

The human society on board the convey ships goes through many phases, which we learn about through short vignettes, none of which could stand alone as a short story, and many of which lack enough continuity with previous vignettes to feel like a single long story. (Read Children of Time for a better version of this kind of storytelling.) And all of those phases are familiar to me. Very, very familiar. I tend to think that if you pack a hundred thousand people on spaceships, radically change the way they reproduce, are born, live, and die, you wouldn’t get exactly the same societal permutations. And yet. Hundreds of years of their society, and they’re still doing all the same old, same old. And, look, maybe it would happen that way! Maybe I’m wrong! But then — why write about it?

The classic SF answer to that question was “because SCIENCE.” The society stayed boringly the same, but the science was shiny and new and intricately worked out. This is not very much the case here. There are big chunks of this that make no sense on a scientific level; I spent a lot of time going, “But —!” and then reminding myself not to get hung up on science facts.

I guess the most impressive thing about this book for me was that it was so very flawed, and yet it was still good enough to keep me interested. I found a ton of things to dislike, but I also kept reading, and I plan on reading the sequel. Just, I really hope there’s more there there in the sequel. show less

This had lots of positive blurbs from well-known sf authors and, more importantly, it was 99p for the ebook, so I decided to take a chance on it. What a mistake. I’ve not read a good science fiction debut by a US author for several years but this one failed to make even that low bar. It is 2088 and an astronomer has discovered an unusual variable star. The world is putting together twelve missions to travel into interstellar space, using a “subdimension drive”, which, despite being show more FTL, will still mean several generations will pass before their destinations are reached. The variable star is chosen as the target of one such convoy. Which comprises seven ships and several hundred thousand clones of the scientists and engineers who put the convoy together. Lostetter uses this somewhat tired set-up to explore a number of banal situations. A young boy doesn’t want a sister. Slavery is bad. AIs can have feelings too. When the convoy reaches its destination, it discovers an enormous alien artefact but does not learn what it is or what it’s for. The author also clearly has a problem with orders of magnitude, as she states Jupiter is one AU wide. And her dimensions of the alien artefact make no sense. She also seems to think sonar works in space (and that subsonic waves can be detected in a vacuum). When two US characters, in the first chapter, enter a traditional pub in Oxford, UK, and a waitress brings beer to their table, I was afraid this was going to be one of those sf novels where the author had done little or no research. That particular faux pas proved to be the least of the book’s problems. Later, two characters watch an episode of Star Trek – yes, this one of those novels set in the future where all the cultural references have relevance only to the author’s generation. The prose is so bland it is entirely forgettable. The science fiction is just complete rubbish from start to finish. The science is made-up. And the whole is in service to a plot which has no end – this is the first book in a trilogy – and whose only quality appears to be triteness. Avoid. In fact, I will go a step further: from this point, I will not read any debuts by US sf authors, say, post-2016. I don’t know what’s happened to US sf publishing, but the books they’ve been pushing over the past couple of years by debut authors have been fucking appalling. As someone or other once said, won’t get fooled again. The same applies to fantasy as well, of course. However, I’m not going to boycott debut sf novels from other nations. I mean, I’m not saying UK sf debuts are better, but UK genre publishing has been pushing fantasy – and YA – debuts for the past few years, and they’re not my thing. Given that more books than ever before are currently being published, when debut novels are nominated for major awards… there is definitely something wrong with genre publishing…. show less

Noumenon is an ambitious book, even by science fiction standards. To investigate a curious far-distant phenomena, Earth conceives an idea to send a fleet of generation ships. Rather than using cryogenics or relying on the whims of breeding, they staff the ships by finding the best scientists in the world to fit specific duties, and they clone them. Generation after generation. This allows nature versus nurture to play out in surprising ways.

This sounds like it might get confusing. It's not. show more 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. show less