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A review by jefffrane
Silver by Linda Nagata
5.0
Linda Nagata's sf seems to be flying under the radar much of the time. Given her decision to self-publish her novels, she doesn't benefit from having a publishing house provide all the promotions (such as they may be), book tours and the like. Which is really unfortunate, because she is unquestionably one of the most creative and significant talents in the field of science fiction. Her near-future stories like The Last Good Man and the Red Trilogy provides some of the best military and hard-sf I've ever read.
Her far-future novels are really far-future, thousands of years and thousands of light years away and it's in these novels, like The Nanotech Succession series and the two books of the Inverted Frontier that Nagata's imagination really soars. They completely engage the fabled Sense of Wonder built on her fascination with nanotechnology but unlike the founding Space Operas of writers like E. E. "Doc" Smith (also far into the future and far across the galaxy) Nagata not only includes actual people but those people are in relationships with others and those relationships are just as critical as the science.
Silver is unusual because it's a sequel to two seemingly-unrelated novels, Memory (2003) and Edges (2019). Memory sets up the story of Verilotus, a constructed planet with more-or-less-normal humans living in a very strange world dominated by Silver (which is a thing I'm not going to explain) and introduces us to several characters that appear again in Silver. At the same time, the book is a sequel to last year's Edges (confusingly part of The Nanotech Succession) where we meet an entirely different group of humans with a unique relationship to technology.
As Edges unfolded, that group of humans interrupts one mission in space to travel to Verilotus and attempt to avoid a disaster of galactic proportions. Whew. So much happening.
And, again, relationships between real people drive the story as much as the amazing tech. Keep your minds open because it's a strange trip indeed.
Her far-future novels are really far-future, thousands of years and thousands of light years away and it's in these novels, like The Nanotech Succession series and the two books of the Inverted Frontier that Nagata's imagination really soars. They completely engage the fabled Sense of Wonder built on her fascination with nanotechnology but unlike the founding Space Operas of writers like E. E. "Doc" Smith (also far into the future and far across the galaxy) Nagata not only includes actual people but those people are in relationships with others and those relationships are just as critical as the science.
Silver is unusual because it's a sequel to two seemingly-unrelated novels, Memory (2003) and Edges (2019). Memory sets up the story of Verilotus, a constructed planet with more-or-less-normal humans living in a very strange world dominated by Silver (which is a thing I'm not going to explain) and introduces us to several characters that appear again in Silver. At the same time, the book is a sequel to last year's Edges (confusingly part of The Nanotech Succession) where we meet an entirely different group of humans with a unique relationship to technology.
As Edges unfolded, that group of humans interrupts one mission in space to travel to Verilotus and attempt to avoid a disaster of galactic proportions. Whew. So much happening.
And, again, relationships between real people drive the story as much as the amazing tech. Keep your minds open because it's a strange trip indeed.