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23795500

>>23794763
Edges, Inverted Frontier #1 - Linda Nagata (2019)

Edges is the first book in a series and the seventh published book in the setting's universe. The Nanotech Succession setting is similar to Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series in that the setting is mostly a mosaic of more or less standalone books. Reynolds said on his blog that Nagata's VAST (1998) was one of his inspirations. Despite this being the first novel I've read from Nagata, I've read some of her short fiction, the similarity to Reynolds is obvious. I don't have any doubt that it would be far more so if I read her books that predate Revelation Space. However, Reynolds has been far more commercially successful. I saw a comment on the same blog entry by Nagata that he gave her a sales bump, so there's that. Mutual support and influence between authors is good.

Edges has characters from the previous book, though that seems mostly to have a connection. There are references to prior books, but as far as I could tell they seem to be nostalgic trivia. I don't see that should be any sort of impediment to starting with this book, as I don't believe they have much in common. I admit that I did put off because of this reason. If it wasn't for the suggestion that I read it, who knows when I would've got around to it.

Due to the events of the previous books, some of the characters believe it's possible that they're the last surviving community of humans. What was once most familiar has now become unknown and where they originated is now the frontier, an inversion of the usual. What become of Earth? Does it even still exist? They want to know. Now they have the opportunity to find out, even though it means leaving everything they've known behind forever, including themselves for some of them.

I wasn't expecting this to be a journey novel, but I wasn't disappointed. It isn't a generation ship book because that implies there's more than one generation. The humans in this are able to freely switch between being physical and digital. There's no problems with cold sleep and other methods of dealing with the passage of time. Edges could be described as Greg Egan's Diaspora if it were less science and more fun. This book is basically a thousand year cross-galactic space trip. That makes it seem somewhat more lighthearted and comfy than it is, as their vehicle is an alien spaceship that exclusively has genocide on its mind.

For the vast majority of the book I was ready to give it 3.5 rounded down to 3, but the last quarter or so really livened up the narrative and made several promises of what was to come in the following books. I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that it'll follow through on them and explore what could be some rather fun and interesting times. I'll be reading more from this series, but it's not a high priority, so not until sometime next year. If I like this series enough I'll read her earlier books in the setting.

Rating: 3.5/5 (4)

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