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The universe of Neverness is and filled with extraordinary beings, such as the neanderthal-like Alaloi and the Order of Pilots. Against this backdrop stands Mallory Ringer, who penetrates the Solid State Entity. There he makes a discovery. One that could unlock the secret of immortality.Tags
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I know this book. I've read it twenty-something years ago and I would say it was a turning point in my life. The questions this book offered me, the answers this book provided defined who I became later. It still defines me. Finally re-reading it now is like coming home. It is the place where I was born. What is "born" even mean? What is that moment of initial creation?.. creation of initial?.. something that was before it became something? It's like looking at the code - I know what is written, I know what it means, I understand how it works (sort of) but... not one single person will see it same way. Some of them won't even see a code, only it's presentation in form of working "product".
The more I read the more I find myself, my self, show more my "I", my "Identity" in there.
Among the humanitarian and vital philosophy of life there is a violence and death in this book too. Not "too". Just "there is". I see and remember now how I twenty years back looked at it as it is. As is. As a certainty. Life and Death. Good and Evil. Love and Hate. Peace and War. Truth and Lie. Many other words and concepts. In years that happen after I've read this book our culture moved into a weird way... It's like we began to subjectify all of this, made it uncertain, made it unreal. We made all this ideas into *context dependent perception of information*. Irregardless of reality, facts, sources. Nothing real matter anymore for us. Only what we feel we think we feel. And I fed on this culture for years. I feasted on it. "It's just a game" as the saying goes. For anything from porn and life to war and death. I grown to look at many thing as they all meaningless and I clearly see it now reflecting back on those first experiences in this book while reading it again.
I look at this book now and see how the truth of it was always with me. It's just maybe some days I would prefer to admit and ignore it, maybe some days I was just too lazy to think. Every rope has two ends.
War changes many things. War shows us what is always here. show less
The more I read the more I find myself, my self, show more my "I", my "Identity" in there.
Among the humanitarian and vital philosophy of life there is a violence and death in this book too. Not "too". Just "there is". I see and remember now how I twenty years back looked at it as it is. As is. As a certainty. Life and Death. Good and Evil. Love and Hate. Peace and War. Truth and Lie. Many other words and concepts. In years that happen after I've read this book our culture moved into a weird way... It's like we began to subjectify all of this, made it uncertain, made it unreal. We made all this ideas into *context dependent perception of information*. Irregardless of reality, facts, sources. Nothing real matter anymore for us. Only what we feel we think we feel. And I fed on this culture for years. I feasted on it. "It's just a game" as the saying goes. For anything from porn and life to war and death. I grown to look at many thing as they all meaningless and I clearly see it now reflecting back on those first experiences in this book while reading it again.
I look at this book now and see how the truth of it was always with me. It's just maybe some days I would prefer to admit and ignore it, maybe some days I was just too lazy to think. Every rope has two ends.
War changes many things. War shows us what is always here. show less
For a book published in 1989, this space epic felt curiously old-fashioned in parts. The world-building (or galaxy-building), with a significant helping of ancient lost or "ascended" alien species and a cosmic angle on human origins and purposes, put me in mind of classic authors of the mid-20th century such as Olaf Stapledon, A. E. van Vogt, or even E. E. 'Doc' Smith. The long-winded philosophizing, on the other hand, recalled the almost indigestible ruminations of John Cowper Powys. The juxtaposition of a hyperspace-crossing civilization (a large element of which is designed to appeal to pure mathematicians) with a primitive Neanderthal-like society living in high Arctic conditions required some gear-changing on the part of the show more reader. There were more modern-feeling elements, such as the advanced entities that play some role in the tale, which made me feel that we were not entirely divorced from the world of later writers such as William Gibson and Iain M. Banks, but overall I found the book quite hard going, and I confess to skim-reading quite a lot of it in order to get through the sheer number of pages. MB 12-viii-2024 show less
Zindell uses the storytelling style of epic fantasy to spin a far-future hard SF tale. Three millennia into the future, Mallory Ringess is a newly trained Pilot of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame that has the monopoly on faster-than-light travel, based in the city of Neverness on the world Icefall. He winds up in an odyssey that takes him into realms of posthuman gods and genetically revived cavemen in pursuit of a solution to the long-term survival of humankind and the mysterious series of supernovae devastating settled worlds.
The depiction of three thousand years of cultural development works manages to convey a sense of strangeness without making me reach for a dictionary like Gene show more Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. The hero gets put through the wringer (sometimes due to his own impetuosity), so I recommend this story for when you’re up for an odyssey, not just thrilling your sense of wonder.
Some parts of the future history are already dated— the book was written at the tail end of the Cold War, back when we all lived with the spectre of Mutual Assured Destruction, and the tale of Old Earth being devastated in a nuclear holocaust already seems quaint. show less
The depiction of three thousand years of cultural development works manages to convey a sense of strangeness without making me reach for a dictionary like Gene show more Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. The hero gets put through the wringer (sometimes due to his own impetuosity), so I recommend this story for when you’re up for an odyssey, not just thrilling your sense of wonder.
Some parts of the future history are already dated— the book was written at the tail end of the Cold War, back when we all lived with the spectre of Mutual Assured Destruction, and the tale of Old Earth being devastated in a nuclear holocaust already seems quaint. show less
This is a really enjoyable 'big idea' science fiction novel that takes place millenia in our future on the planet Icefall, also called Neverness. It's kind of [b:Dune|1685995|Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1)|Frank Herbert|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311873074s/1685995.jpg|3634639] meets Malory's [b:Le Morte d'Arthur, Vol 1|219265|Le Morte d'Arthur, Vol 1|Thomas Malory|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1195733538s/219265.jpg|18895563] with high level mathematics, posthumanism, and trippy metaphysics thrown in.
The story follows the life of Mallory Ringess, a trainee enrolled at "the Academy" that was founded by a pseudo-monastic order of truth-seekers called 'the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame' show more hoping to become a pilot. Now in this day and age a pilot is a very special kind of beast who combines the aspects of a theoretical mathematician with those of a questing knight. Using advanced mathematics the pilots are able to navigate within the manifold, a kind of hyperspace that links all parts of the universe, but whose dangers can lead the untrained or the unwary to get lost in the tangled skeins of space-time. The pilots are thus a special breed. They are men and women who live for the precarious dangers of the manifold and who search, quixote-like, for the proof of the elusive Continuum Hypothesis which would allow a pilot to fall from any point in the universe to any other without the complicated mathematical mappings normally required to traverse hyperspace.
It is also a quest for godhood as the pilots search for the secrets known as the Elder Eddas. These secrets are said to allow beings to transcended their mortality and become gods of one sort or another, and the galaxy is sparsely populated with some of these dangerous and unknowable superbeings, former humans whose consciousness is now housed in nebulae or moon-sized computers. This dangerous life has brought about the motto of the pilots: "Journeymen die", for it is few pilots who ever survive to their mastership.
The world Zindell creates is a fascinating one full of strangeness and wonder. Mallory is an interesting character, equal parts idealistic dreamer and pompous ass. His best friend Bardo is even more entertaining...a figure equal parts Falstaff and Porthos. The story bogged down a bit for me in the middle where Mallory and his fellow searchers look for the Elder Eddas among the Alaloi, a group of humans who had 'carked' their flesh and minds to become like the Neanderthals of earth in rejection of the advanced technology used by the other people of Neverness. Overall, however, this is a great tale, bursting at the seams with crazy-awesome ideas that leave a lot of food for the imagination.
Recommended. show less
The story follows the life of Mallory Ringess, a trainee enrolled at "the Academy" that was founded by a pseudo-monastic order of truth-seekers called 'the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame' show more hoping to become a pilot. Now in this day and age a pilot is a very special kind of beast who combines the aspects of a theoretical mathematician with those of a questing knight. Using advanced mathematics the pilots are able to navigate within the manifold, a kind of hyperspace that links all parts of the universe, but whose dangers can lead the untrained or the unwary to get lost in the tangled skeins of space-time. The pilots are thus a special breed. They are men and women who live for the precarious dangers of the manifold and who search, quixote-like, for the proof of the elusive Continuum Hypothesis which would allow a pilot to fall from any point in the universe to any other without the complicated mathematical mappings normally required to traverse hyperspace.
It is also a quest for godhood as the pilots search for the secrets known as the Elder Eddas. These secrets are said to allow beings to transcended their mortality and become gods of one sort or another, and the galaxy is sparsely populated with some of these dangerous and unknowable superbeings, former humans whose consciousness is now housed in nebulae or moon-sized computers. This dangerous life has brought about the motto of the pilots: "Journeymen die", for it is few pilots who ever survive to their mastership.
The world Zindell creates is a fascinating one full of strangeness and wonder. Mallory is an interesting character, equal parts idealistic dreamer and pompous ass. His best friend Bardo is even more entertaining...a figure equal parts Falstaff and Porthos. The story bogged down a bit for me in the middle where Mallory and his fellow searchers look for the Elder Eddas among the Alaloi, a group of humans who had 'carked' their flesh and minds to become like the Neanderthals of earth in rejection of the advanced technology used by the other people of Neverness. Overall, however, this is a great tale, bursting at the seams with crazy-awesome ideas that leave a lot of food for the imagination.
Recommended. show less
This is definitely one of the better science fiction books of his generation and it contains quite a few new and refreshing ideas as well as a good analysis of the psyche of the main characters. But sometimes the contemplative moments get to be a bit longwinded at the risk of losing the interest of the reader. So, in my opinion, this is a good book, but it has no place in my top ten.
There are some stunning ideas in this book and for the first half of the book, it was a real page turner. However, it lost pace halfway through but then picked up. In many ways a spellbinding read, it just needed consistency of pace.
One of my favourite SF series!So inventive, great characters, good plots, simple and effective style...And some sipritual hints...
Never understood why it is not considered a great sci-fi author
Never understood why it is not considered a great sci-fi author
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Neverness
- Original title
- Neverness
- Original publication date
- 1988-03
- People/Characters
- Mallory Ringess; Bardo; Horthy Hosthoh; Moira Ringess; Leopold Soli; Katharine (show all 8); Yuri; Justine
- Important places
- Icefall
- Epigraph
- On Old Earth, the ancients often wondered at the origin of life, and they created many myths to explain the mystery of mysteries. There was Mumu the mother goddess who swallowed a great snake which multiplied inside of her... (show all) and whose nine billion children ate their way through her belly into the light of day and so became the animals of the land and the fishes of the sea. There was a father god, Yahweh, who created Earth and the heavens In six days and who called forth the birds and the beasts on days five and six. There was a fertility goddess and a goddess of chance named Random Mutation. And so on. And so on. The truth is, life throughout the galaxy was everywhere seeded by a race known as the Ieldra. Of course the origin of the Ieldra is unknown and perhaps unknowable: the ultimate mystery remains.
from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Timekeeper and Lord
Horologe of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the
Ineffable Flame
There Is infinite hope, but not for Man.
Franz Kalka, Holocaust Century
Fabulist - First words
- Long before we knew that the price of the wisdom and immortality we sought would be almost beyond our means to pay, when man--what was left of man--was still like a child playing with pebbles and shells by the seashore, in th... (show all)e time of the quest for the mystery known as the Elder Eddas, I heard the call of the stars and prepared to leave the city of my birth and death.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I walked back up the beach
toward my shimmering city to join Bardo for dinner, to be gloriously
human again for a little while. - Blurbers
- Card, Orson Scott
- Original language
- English
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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