Pros: A spectacular vision - powerful technology, clearly-drawn characters, action that grips and won't let go.
Cons: None whatsoever.
The Bottom Line: This novel goes where the Rama series went, and then goes farther, harder, faster, deeper. One of the biggest sci-fi novels I've read in a long time.
"... with a mixture of retribution and charity, they used the lasers to destroy the attackers' engines, and their weapons, and they made prisoners out of the survivors. Then, with a roaring voice, they shouted at the Milky Way.
"'This ship is ours!' they shouted. 'Ours! Now, and always! The Ship belongs to us...!'"
A colossal starship, a ship the size of Jupiter, is falling towards the galaxy. Through a combination of luck, skill, and sheer moxie, humans got to it first. Humans took control of it. Humans defended it from all who wished to take it from them. And then they decided to change its trajectory, to take it on a millennia-long cruise around the galaxy, taking on passengers of any and every race in exchange for advanced technology or valuable metals. In this future, humans have been redesigned, made stronger, made eternal - able to survive anything short of a nuclear blast, as long as their bioceramic brain can be recovered and their near-indestructible bodies revived.
The Captains run the ship, in their distinctive mirrored uniforms. Those who first explored The Ship, like the Master Captain and her humourless, ultra-efficient right hand, Miocene. Those who came later, like Washen, adventurous and tough as nails, with a talent for understanding alien species, or Pamir, disgraced and exiled from the ranks of the Captains for allowing a dangerous entity on board The Ship. Within their ranks, the only way to advance is to be better than your superiors, to know how to do every possible job with superior skill. Within their ranks, raw ambition is concentrated and distilled.
And one day, the best of the best of the Captains suddenly recieve a high-priority alert, telling them to disappear without a trace and assemble in an abandoned habitat hanging from the roof of a fuel tank like a sea of liquid hydrogen. There, they are charged by the Master Captain with a task - to explore a strange new world in the very centre of The Ship, a world the size of Mars that nobody even suspected the existence of. A world called Marrow.
"'When the Master announces to the galaxy what we've found down here, and she tells about our roles in this great adventure... when that happens, I think everyone everywhere is going to know our story (...) Our famous ship has something hidden inside it,' said Diu. 'Imagine what people will think.'"
Encased in a giant mirrored globe, surrounded by strange energy fields, Marrow is a world of eternal daylight, a world of boiling iron and tectonic flux where the chemistry of the local life is based on gold and oily waxes and continual destruction. And a mysterious accident leaves these hundreds of Captains, The Ship's best officers, stranded on Marrow for without even the simplest of technologies.
In turn, led by Miocene's unstoppable energy and implacable hatred of the Master Captain who left them for dead on a pitiless world where no stability is possible, the Captains slowly work toward the goal of rebuilding a bridge to the outside world. With the relentless logic of survival, entire generations are borne and birthed by the castaways, 'grandchildren' whose labour will provide the industrial society needed to manufacture the technologically advanced materials which will go into building the bridge.
Marrow is one of the best pieces of big-idea scifi that I have read in a long time. It puts one in mind of the great masterworks of the Golden Age, Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov's huge stories of galactic empires and ancient alien civilizations, but with an entirely modernist spin. Here we see human ingenuity and guts in all their glory, whether it be in taking an unimaginable alien artifact and making it their own, or building a civilization from the ground up. And yet the ultimate message is that the arrogance and ambition of the human drive to succeed may well be our downfall; our assumptions about the nature of thing have so often turned out to be half-baked guesses at best, and this book drives that point home again and again.
It also has a great deal to say about what is considered a worthwhile goal, the meaning of 'success' to different cultures and to humanity in general. The obsession of most of the Captains on Marrow, especially of the driven Miocene, is escape from a hostile alien world; this obsession is a twisting drive which provokes Miocene and those who think like her to murder, despotism, and worse. Near the beginning, an imprisoned alien refuses the technology that would extend its brief life to the millennia that any human of the book's time can expect, stating that to do so would be to steal the lifetimes allotted to generations yet unborn; this is a foreshadowing of a conflict as vast as any in human history, a conflict over goal and direction which would be magnificent in itself, and is even more inspiring for the fact that it is overshadowed by the everyday marvel of the great Ship which is forever 'just upstairs' and the technology which allows a single person to direct and control generations of cultural evolution.
But perhaps the most impressive part of Robert Reed's talent is his ability to create personalities which span millennia of plot in both a consistent and a psychologically believable manner. Each character is guided by a single driving psychological factor which remains intact through wrack and ruin, strife and heartbreak, giving the people a focus which is at the same time enviable and more than a little frightening. One of them literally dies and is brought back to life three times, in the course of a chapter's worth of back-story.
"'By your own admission, you piloted the Great Ship for a hundred millennia before you realized that Marrow was here. And now you've lived here for another three millennia, and hasn't it ever occurred to you, just once, that the mysteries don't stop?'"
Robert Reed has given us an astounding vision, of science and society, ambition and love, an epic spanning thousands of years. It is quite possibly the best sci-fi novel of the last decade. Read it and be amazed.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.