Roche’s ship is crewed by
the cyborg brain of Uri Kajik; Maii, a telepathic "reave"; and two enigmas:
Adoni Cane, another clone, and the Box, a unique artificial intelligence.
The villains of the piece, who also search for the clone warrior, hold
another mysterious psychic captive, and this hapless creature describes
the scene in occasional interludes.
What's a "reave"? Newcomers
to the series (like myself) have a bumpy ride for the first few chapters
-- there’s quite a proliferation of strange terms, enough to rate a thorough
glossary. I could live with learning a bunch of names for the different
Human Castes, and the assorted technologies, but there’s a whole gang of
factions in play, and their conflicts require some understanding of history
to appreciate.
Reading the glossary beforehand
will saddle the reader with lots of extraneous detail, some of which doesn’t
seem relevant to this particular book, but may be preferable to flipping
pages every few paragraphs early on. I suppose it serves me right for not
having read the first book in the series, Evergence:
The Prodigal Sun.
Space is big
The novel does a nice job
of expressing the scale of space. All the action takes place in one isolated
solar system, so we’re really only dealing with one very small neighborhood
in a huge civilization. But the full scope of that civilization is still
present -- cleverly expressed through history.
Human civilization is so
old that it’s forgotten how old it is. Some nations believe certain events
took place 2,500 years ago, some believe they are much older. Humanity
has speciated into Castes, some races on isolated worlds even devolving
back into non-sentient animals before climbing back to "intelligence."
Some have "Transcended" into ineffable, godlike forces.
Meanwhile, restricting the
meat of the story to one star system doesn’t make for a small setting.
Faster-than-light travel exists, but events in the story curtail its use,
and so fighting it out in the vast interplanetary spaces plays out like
a slow-motion ballet. Shipboard battles are less satisfying
A pleasing use of craft
The action itself is good.
The Wunderkind comes up with some truly sinister tactics, using miniscule
starting resources to destroy a powerful military presence. The few survivors
-- and various other players who arrive to observe the devastated system
-- are crafty and paranoid, each faction hiding from the others while searching
for answers. Keeping communications open and secure becomes a major source
of drama in itself.
However, the plot has some
irksome weaknesses. It’s never clear why such a small crew is chasing after
such a dangerous opponent.
Roche is, she says, an independent
-- so who is she beholden to, and why does her crew follow her? The crew,
especially the Box, is so competent, and she delegates so much to them
that I was wondering why she’s in charge at all. Most of the time she frets
about the situation, or her own ineffectuality.
When she finally is isolated,
thankfully, she proves to be resourceful and battle-ready.
Otherwise, the story takes
some twists but most just don’t surprise. There’s enough good inter-character
drama and brain-candy going on to make up for the predictable areas, but
they bothered me nonetheless.
The story ends, not quite
on a cliffhanger, but certainly with more to tell. Several major conflicts
and mysteries remain unresolved. I have the impression the previous book
in the Evergence universe left off the same way. I’m not even sure whether
to be disappointed.
On the one hand, I’m not
sure where the characters were coming from in the beginning, and in the
end, they haven’t resolved much of their trouble from the opening chapters
There’s one subplot regarding the two psychics that was left infuriatingly
vague. On the other hand, my interest in their troubles, and their enormous
backdrop, is certainly piqued.
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