part of the Inverted Frontier series, but also a sequel to Memory, which wraps up that duology. this one is not as good as Edges, its predecessor in the Inverted Frontier series, largely because the tone of Memory, its more fantasy-derived characters and its planetary world, is not a good match for that of the Inverted Frontier deep-space ships of its far future. but it's an interesting story all the same. ( )

A crippled god tries to return to his broken creation. A man pursues, trying to stop him from gaining more power. A young woman looks for her lost love.

This book is quite different than its predecessor, Edges. Much of the action takes place on Verilotus, the artificial world that Lezuri, that god-like castaway picked up by Dragon in the proceeding book, created.

At the climax to Edges, a chase ensued following the Pyrrhic War which wrested control of the Dragonfrom Lezuri. But not a chase of bodies but of minds encoded as information, “ghosts”, as Lezuri beamed himself from the information systems of outriding vessel to outriding vessel.

Eventually, he took control of one and headed to Verilotus where a fight with a “goddess” left him crippled and that settlement wrecked. It seems the two entities, possessing extremely sophisticated nanotechnology, created a world but disagreed as to its ultimate use.

But Urban, the leader of the Dragon expedition, is in pursuit. As far as he knows, Dragon is still in Lezuri’s hands, and he won’t communicate with it for fear that his incarnation in one of those outriders will be detected.

Urban wants to reach the world first and stop Lezuri from using its nanotech resources to gain further power.

On Verilotus, a ring-like world where humans live on the outer rim, Urban meets Jubilee and her younger brother Jolly.

If Jubilee and Jolly sound familiar to long time Nagata readers, that’s because they and Verilotus were at the center of Nagata’s Memory. This takes place about four years after that story, and Nagata has seamlessly stitched the novel into her Nanotech Succession series and provides a clear explanation of the strange phenomena on Verilotus. I know because I didn’t read Memories until after this novel.

Verilotus is a world with its own version of nanotechnology, the same Lezuri uses though Jolly and Jubilee don’t know that and only learned to control some of its secrets in Memories.

They join with Urban to try to take down Lezuri.

Despite a few slow spots, Nagata mostly keeps the story moving even in a book this long. Surprisingly, she brings all her players to the table about midway in her plot rather than much later which is what most writers would do. It works though.

Besides the battle between competing nanotechnologies, one the “makers” of Urban and the other Lezuri’s, I liked the conflict between Jubilee and Jolly when the latter, curious, decides to have an “atrium”, an artificially generated brain organ, put in his head by Urban. To Jubilee, in a world where nanotechnology control is centered around temples, this is major overturning of the culture of their world.

Other characters from Edges show up – nobody actually died in the Pyrrhic War. Nagata continues to exploit the many uses of her nanotechnology while still presenting it as a technology needing energy and raw materials. As in the preceding novel, some startling things happen if you just treat minds as recorded information that can be edited and duplicated and transmitted. And some characters are going to have to assume our primitive existence – one mind, one incarnation, no backups.

Nagata chose a variety of narrative voices here. Many of Jolly’s sections are narrated in her voice. Lezuri’s viewpoint characters are in second person which, when dealing with a god, seems more appropriate than Vyet’s second person sections in Edges.

And, as befitting a struggle with a god, Jubilee and Jolly will feel the world shift beneath their feet by story’s end.

As an aside, I liked how Riffan, right up to the end, holds on to the foolish naivete of a cultural anthropologist when he tries to negotiate with Lezuri.

We get very slight hints of what may have went on in the Hallowed Vasties, and I hope Nagata, at some point, decides to return to this universe. ( )

Rather than to instill a sense of wonder in the reader (which any half-decent SF writer should be able to do without trying), isn't the point of the Mundane movement to draw a distinction between: the kind of pragmatic science fiction that delivers realistic-ish, well-written stories about where we humans are at the moment, where we might be going next; and all the rest of fiction? Quibbling over semantics and picking philosophical holes in the Mundane manifesto seems pretty trivial compared to their clear-minded conviction that taking SF in this particular direction will, if only slightly and indirectly, persuade the general public of how full of potential the mundane, by which I believe they mean this little planet, its little population and its little sciences, can be. Surely that can only be a good thing?

Writing about ecological change and biotechnology are not new and certainly not mundane. They are subjects that writers have been considering for a long time: Mary Shelley wrote about the death of humanity from a plague in the "Last Man"- and what is "Frankenstein" or "The island of Doctor Moreau" about, if not biotechnology? Nanotechnology a la Nagata is just biotechnology updated. The job of speculative fiction is to be ahead of the news, from J.G. Ballard's vision of global warming in "The Drowned World" in the 1960s to Byron's poem "Darkness" about a world dying from heat loss, written years before the second theory of thermodynamics was ever formulated. "I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air, etc." There is nothing mundane about these concepts, and the writers like Nagata got there before they became science or news.

The most common criticism seems to be that the Mundane ideas aren't original. I don't think they are claiming that they are, but rather that these are ideas that they believe should play a larger part in contemporary SF. Certainly if you look at the SF on the shelves in most bookstores at the moment there is a lot less 'Hard SF' than there was ten or twenty years ago, its mostly Crappy Space Opera and other forms of Crappy Science Fantasy. I quite hate that kind of writing; I prefer more “scientifically” grounded work, so I think its perfectly valid for writers to try and swing the genre back round in that direction if they think its important.

Nagata’s writing belongs to the best kind of SF seeing the light of day nowadays. Too bad “The Sense of Wonder” in “Silver” is largely absent. That’s the problem with all second volumes!!! Arhg! ( )