Final volume of Benford's stirring Galactic Center series (Furious Gulf, 1994, etc.). Using the energies of the huge black hole at the center of our galaxy, advanced alien ``Highers'' have created the ``esty,'' a region of space-time so crushed and compacted that it resembles matter. Here, many human and alien species have taken refuge from the marauding ``mechs,'' machine- beings hostile to organic life. Wise old Nigel Walmsley, once a physicist on Earth, now hundreds of years old, serves the Highers as a communications bridge to the Bishop clan, led by Killeen and his son Toby. But then the dreaded Grey Mech penetrates the esty, blasting Nigel and his family through a space-time wormhole to the unimaginably remote future, where the mechs are transforming themselves into electron-positron plasmas in order to survive the heat death of the universe. The Highers also prompt Nigel to rediscover a great secret embedded in the Bishops' genes: a set of infective computer codes that will destroy the mechs by subjecting them to intense pleasure. And so to a final showdown between clan Bishop and their unremitting mech foe, the soul-eating Mantis. Extravagantly, mind-bogglingly strangeyet it's the well- realized characters as much as Benford's astounding inventiveness that propel this amorphous drama to its utterly fascinating conclusion.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-08655-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
The fifth and last volume in Card's sprawling Homecoming saga (Earthfall, reviewed in our Nov. 15, 1994, issue). The travelers from planet Harmony, with their ailingcomputer Oversoul, reached Earth but could not determine the whereabouts of the mysterious, powerful keeper of Earth. Now, 500 years later, only Shedemei the Navigator of the original travelers survives. The keeper, a sort of Gaean planetary consciousness, still cannot be located, though his/her influence is manifest; and still the three intelligent species — subterranean diggers, flying angels, and humans — have not learned how to get along. The stage is set for another struggle between the forces of enlightenment and those of repression and bigotry. More than parable, not quite allegory, Card's far-future religious saga manages, brilliantly, to be at once entertaining, unobjectionable, and edifying.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0812532988
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
The latest from Barnes (Mother of Storms, 1994, etc.) opens on Mars early in the 22nd century, where Joshua Ali Quare wakes from a long illness with only scattered memories; among his few possessions is an advanced computer containing hundreds of documents, many contradictory, detailing his past lives. Born in 1969, the son of an American communist, Joshua was quickly recruited by the KGB, then infected with a virus that, every 15 years, renders him helpless. When he recovers, ready to assume a new identity, he's ten years younger—but most of his memories are gone. After the collapse of communism, Joshua continued to work for the Organization, whose object had become power and profit rather than ideological conquest; he worked by intimidation and assassination to promote or suppress scientific discoveries. In a later incarnation, he fought in the War of the Memes, where various artificial intelligences and their ``memes,'' copies of computer programs capable of taking over human brains, vied for dominance; eventually, the Earth was converted into the anthill-like Resuna. Joshua barely escaped to Mars. Now, he discovers that his old war buddy Sadi has become a woman—and immortal; not only that, but she's taken over the Organization—and perfected a method of time travel that gives her almost unlimited power to remake the world to her own desires. Meanwhile, a rescue fleet from 300 years in the future heads back for a showdown with the dangerously expansionist Resuna. Grim, sinewy, consistently surprising, and—despite Barnes's habitual, and always irksome, present-tense narration— unforgettable.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85561-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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