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Loading... Noumenonby Marina J. Lostetter
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 4 stars 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 writing just didn't flow for me. It worked a lot better after I started listening to this on audio, but it still wasn't quite to my tastes. The writing wasn't bad by any means, simply not to my tastes. 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. --- Re-read 03/2021 in preparation for the third part. Still a solid four star. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesNoumenon (1)
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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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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. ( )