96

Excellent world building. Superb descriptive prose. Story - not enough to draw me into the sequel. ( )

The Golden Age by John C. Wright is a fully developed view of an age 10,000 years into the future, named the “Golden Oecumene”. The solar system is a utopian society teeming with a vast assortment of human, artificial intelligence, nearly immortal tech-assisted post-humans, and many entities in between, including mass minds and AI collectives. They exist in an abundantly populated Solar System that has been re-engineered on a planetary scale. The book is filled with big ideas, whether it’s the layers of alternate reality the beings exist and communicate through, or the complex society and subtle relationships between the various life-forms. The scale of the world-building in this trilogy is stunning.

I enjoyed the start of this story, set at a masquerade ball during the time of ‘High-Transcendence”, an event held every thousand years, meant to bring together all life forms, to celebrate the Golden Oecumene, and to plan the next thousand years. The masquerade allows beings to conceal their identity, which provides some intrigue and a slow reveal of many of the main characters. The protagonist is Phaethon, son of Helion. A great lord, Helion, completed some celestial engineering of the Sun providing some of the stability and power to this golden age. Phaethon quickly realizes he has lost large swaths of his memory and quickly determines that he himself played a role in suppressing his memories. The rest of this first book, largely follows Phaethon attempting to recover his lost memories, but also unraveling a web of complexity and intrigue.

In my opinion, the novel is not without its issues. I found it to be a laborious read, never turning into the ‘mind-movie’ that the best books create for me. I was never able to easily visual the settings and I never connected with the characters. The one exception might be Rhadamanthus, Phaethon’s AI assistant that often manifests as a penguin. There are no strong female characters, and the most important one, is a strikingly beautiful, puppet replica who is deeply in love with Phaethon, but is constantly dismissed. In this respect, the book feels a bit like a typical 1950’s misogynistic sci-fi novel. What’s impressive is that despite its flaws, I never once considered abandoning this book. It was not the plot or characters that kept me, but the continuous creative ideas about this utopian society so far in the future.

I will likely read the next two novels at some point, hoping that Wright continues to produce the intriguing ideas, but also finding better footing is his story telling. I don’t read a great deal of far future or cyberpunk sci-fi, so maybe I’m being exposed to concepts and ideas that more common than I realize. But for me, this was chocked full of imaginative concepts.

A challenging read, but worth the investment due to the non-stop mind-stretching imagining of a far off future, it’s inhabitants, and it’s wonders and tribulations. ( )

I'm being generous with the three stars, because it definitely suffered on the reread. I still like the basic concept: Phaeton is investigating himself because he has large chunks of his memory missing, and he's trying to figure out why he's done this to himself and how this affects his sense of self. The book and its world are hamstrung by the author's worldview, however, and the talking exposition wears on you after a while. At least his editor stuck with the book till the end this time instead of giving up halfway through. ( )

Trilogy of a wildly exuberant, neo-Romantic far future solar system. Vivid alternate mental structures, super science, with a hero who's brave and bold, yet always a civilized gentleman. And AI super-intelligences secretly laughing at their beloved, amusing humans. Bonus - the most lovingly-detailed, geek-a-licious starship ever.