Linda NagataRezensionen

Second book in a series starts with a very interesting, albeit highly confusing military trial of our hero Lt Shelley and his team. Following their actions against the industry giant [intent of destroying the mysterious Red even if it means detonating the nuclear weapons on US territory] Shelley's team is charged with working with outside national force to penalize US citizen.

While public opinion is very much leaning towards Shelley's team, mysterious forces, both antagonistic and supportive of our heroes, start to approach and execute their own plans. While Shelley will try to stay out of the obvious conflict between Red and the Dragons (long living, almost immortal corporate leaders) he will find himself sucked into conflicts with various factions, shadow military outfits, paramilitaries bent on controlling the Red and finally outfit that seems to be directly at Red's service.

Author's style is truly beautiful and - as story progresses and our heroes are bounced around the urban areas hit by bomb attacks, rural areas under constant buzz of drones and automated weapons hunting for them to final battle that will leave Shelley at the mercy of of the nature - Nagata manages to give us various entanglements between the members of the team, their fears, their sorrow when teammates are harmed or even killed, constant attempts to finding the meaning for themselves in the new world outside the military that discharged them from service after the trials.

There is not a boring moment in the book, and this includes love scenes and flirts between team-members, that I usually find very boring and nothing but page filler.

Action scenes are wonderfully written, everyone is fair game, everyone can be hurt and even killed (that boarding operation on the cargo ship was breath taking, and action on the Dragon owned Earth orbiting satellite-habitat was so reminiscent of Neuromancer it got me giggling with joy :)) so you are glued to the very last page to see how it will end.

If you like stories like that of TV show Person of Interest - this is the book for you.

Highly recommended to fans of SF, action, and political thrillers. Onto the last book in the series :)

there's a lot going on in this hard sf series, #4 of 5 in the far future with all these posthuman adventurers sailing across time in the universe, and it's all captivating if you start at the beginning. i've been reading Linda Nagata for a long time and she never lets me down. great climax too, and an intriguing setup for Book 5, when she gets that one written.

There were things I really liked about this book. The premise of the Red (which I won't go into because spoilers), the bleak idea of defense contractors starting and continuing wars so they can sell weapons, the beginning and the ending.

But the only character with any substance is Shelley, the MC, and he isn't that developed. Everyone else is basically cardboard, especially Shelley's crew of soldiers. Even his girlfriend is pretty flat. And the villain, too, seems very threadbare. So I just didn't connect with any of the people, and I didn't care what happened to them.

In addition, the plot jerks around, not in a thriller-twisty way, but in a kind of wait-what? way. It also dragged in the middle where it wasn't clear what the story was. But despite all that, it was well-written and I was interested enough to finish. Not intending to read the sequels at this time, but you never know.½

Interesting stories, some are non-standalone [in my opinion] tie-ins (the fantasy one with the chivalrous smoke demon) that might leave the reader a little bit confused because the story just drops you in the middle of things, some are tie-ins that can stand on their own (e.g. RED related stories) and some are pure standalone adventures (like excellent inter-dimensional fantasy/SF story and the horror story with the survivors of the airplane crash).

Good collection, but again that is to be expected from Linda Nagata.

Highly recommended.

Excellent thriller placed in not so far future where dominance of big corporations is such that they control the behavior of states and use them as puppets to earn as much money as possible while discarding human lives as collateral damage. In this future everything is linked through the computer network (aka Cloud) and when balance is endangered it endangers the whole structure of society.

In such a world band of soldiers tries to do a right thing and bring criminals to justice - even at the cost of their own freedom and even lives. And in the background lurks an AI whose motives nobody understands but he moves people around like chess pieces. Some try to control it, some try to destroy it and almost everyone is afraid they are already under control of this mysterious entity but not aware of it.

Highly recommended. Cannot wait to move to 2nd and 3rd part of the trilogy.

a pastiche of a lot of other writers and ideas, but still well-written and fairly entertaining

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More of a 4.5 since I wasn't super-enamored of any of the characters -- though I did like many of them. The story and the mystery at the heart of it are top notch. The science is spot on, and the science fiction elements were well-thought-out.

Far-future sci-fi has always intrigued and fascinated me. A lot of it falls short of course, but whe it's well-done, I find it hard to put down. And that was certain the case here. I listened to it in just a couple days and will be jumping right in to the sequel.

The scope of this story, in space and in time, is worthy of the label space opera. While hardly unique, The lack of faster-than-light travel (and communication) expands the timescale and lends a different feel to it than it would otherwise have. Have decades or more for the characters to do things, resolve issues, presents interesting challenges for the story telling and Nagata handles them deftly.

Nicole Poole does an amirable job as narrator, managing distinct and believable voices for male and female characters alike.

Quite unexpectedly -- in that the notification of it came relatively shortly before its publication compared to most other books -- the third book in decidedly-un-Asian-looking Linda Nagata's Inverted Frontier series came out in June of this year. I really liked the first two installments: far future, crazy physics, a rich setting.

Book three lives up to my experience of one and two. It adds a lot of exploration of personal identity and what constitutes human in a world were virtual subselves, called ghosts in the books, can be instantiated at will, but with altered personalities, and whose experiences will be integrated back into the 'real' (whatever that means!) you.

Most importantly for fans of the series, it advances the story in some interesting ways as well as develops the main characters further. Nagata also introduced a new character through which the some of those identity and humanity questions are explored, and who I think was my favorite of the book.

The prose was a bit rough in places. One notable bit of ugliness that stuck in my head as it was near the end: A shiver radiated across the still-expanding expanse of her mind. Expanding expanse? Really? Urgh. I mean, just off the top of my head, without looking at a thesaurus: “expanding vista” or “blossoming expanse.” I'm surprised none of the several reviewers and proofreaders mentioned in the acknowledgements said anything about this.

But, hey, not everyone can be a master prose stylist, of course, and it's equally obvious that being one isn't necessary to tell a good story. And the Inverted Frontier series is a good story.

The icing on the cake, though, is in Nagata's afterword. She's planning to write two more book in the series to wrap it up. Color me pleased as punch.

DNF, quit and returned the e-book because it was a little slow. It's that kind of techy-detailed that showed research without the skill to keep it interesting. Then, randomly, in one scene I got thoughts from more than one character. This is called head-hopping. If it doesn't bother you, ignore this review. :)

Done deliberately and consistently, this is called "omniscient" - and a reader can depend on it. But random means the author doesn't understand how distracting and potentially confusing it is, and/or the editor doesn't know enough to suggest the author not do it.

Nagata, Linda. Edges. Inverted Frontier No. 1. Mythic Island Press, 2019.
On the edge of its galactic frontier, humanity has been almost wiped out by unmanned alien warships. A man called Urban has captured one of the alien craft and is leading an expedition to a region of space near ancient Earth. Urban and his crew spend a lot of time in suspended animation. They are also able to upload themselves into the ship’s computer system and create any number of avatars and partial copies of themselves—in other words, the whole bag of far-future transhuman tricks based on quantum computing and nanotechnology. The alien ship itself, though, has the most interesting bit of far-future tech—a cloud of “philosopher cells.” These glowing cells surround the ship and form an alien collective consciousness that must be argued into operating the ship. In the Inverted Frontier series, Linda Nagata is joining the Alastair Reynolds and Peter F. Hamilton school of space opera. 4 stars.

Linda Nagata’s The Martian Obelisk is a stylish short story that would work well as an episode in Love, Death & Robots. Life on near-future Earth is dying out from the usual causes. An architect on Earth is using robots to build a monumental sculpture on Mars by scavenging material from a failed Mars colony. Should the permanent monument to human achievement be scrapped to extend the life of some doomed colonists? It is art versus the cold equations. 4 stars.

i dunno, i have long liked reading Linda Nagata, though mostly because of her sf books. maybe it was because this one was fantasy; few writers can carry off both equally well. but anyway i've now read this whole series and it didn't strike me at all.

Nagata, Linda. The Last Good Man. Mythic Island Press, 2017.
I was not as big a fan of Linda Nagata’s Red series as most fans of military SF, but in The Last Good Man, Nagata has put all the elements of near-future warfare in a tight, fast-paced, and nuanced package. The story focuses on the efforts of True Brighton and her team of mercenaries to capture a former colleague who seems to have gone rogue. True is a fully developed character who asks herself all the right questions about the ethics of her profession, but these ruminations never slow the action. In Nagata’s vision of the future, warfare has become one more venue for private enterprise. Corporations and three-letter government agencies hire private companies to achieve limited military goals. They use a chilling array of drones, remote targeting, surveillance devices, 3D printed weapons, and big-data research tools to track and take down their targets. Unfortunately, these tools are also available to their opponents, and some of them are as lethal on the home front as the battlefield. 4 stars.

(...)

If you like the blurb of the novel, and if you enjoy reading that has more in common with Mission Impossible than with Tinker Tinker Soldier Spy, by all means, go for it.

I don’t want to accuse Nagata of having written a superficial popcorn book. She did try to infuse the book with a certain depth: the political climate of the novel is a critique of where things stand right now in the USA, and the protagonist has a backstory that involves personal climate trauma. On top of that, the basic mystery of the novel is epistemic: can Ava trust all the data her AI smart glasses constantly feed her? How far up the chain of command does the corruption reach? Who can she trust, and who is part of the terrorist plot?

Sadly, all of these things have just one layer to them: it is all straightforward and transparent conceptually, even if the plot of the book retains part of this epistemic uncertainty until the end.

(...)

Full review on Weighing A Pig½

I enjoyed this half sci-fi, half adventure story about symbiotic nanotechnology gone out of control. There were a lot of moving parts and characters I was invested in. I actually think it was pretty light in depth on the hard sci-fi parts (ponderings about the sentience of the nanotech didn't really go anywhere), but the well-paced adventure parts made up for it. I do think there were way too many loose ends at the end regarding the fate of the LOVs and remaining characters, the Mother Tiger AI, the political dynamics, etc.½

It was very interesting to read this immediately after [b:Smoke|27208482|Smoke|Dan Vyleta|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1449013739s/27208482.jpg|47250255]. In some ways, they are posing and engaging with the same fundamental question from very different genres and perspectives.

The Red: First Light

Linda Nagata 2013

This was a very good hard sf novel. At first one would be tempted to call it military sf, but that is not accurate in my opinion. What's the difference? Everything that separates good writing from formula and meaningful provocative sf from old tropes rehashed.

Told in the present tense, the narrative is compelling from the beginning. It is filled with action scenes that have meaning rather than existing just for excitement. Part of the way Nagata accomplishes this is through character development. Each actor is unique and the action scenes develop this uniqueness and make us care about the players. We are fascinated by the technology, excited by the action and interested in what motivates each character.

In short order we are introduced to the main themes of the book: the mysterious voice that Lt. Shelley hears and which saves him and his squad numerous times; the cultural crisis of wars fought for economic stimulus and promoted by large defense contractors; the political corruption that this culture creates.

It is these themes and these characters that drive the narrative and that narrative ties unexpected directions. This is the greatest aspect of the novel--we cannot predict the events, but when they occur, we realize their importance to both the characters and the themes. There are big ideas and concepts here, not in the sense of Niven's Ringworld, but in the sense of where is our world headed and do we want to passively go along for the ride.

Lt. Shelley does not, and neither do the members of his squad, Sgt. Vasquez and private Ransom, who refers to Shelley as King David because he thinks Shelley listens to the voice of god. Neither does Lissa, Shelley's girlfriend, although she is a very reluctant participant.

This is an exemplary novel that succeeds on three levels: enough action for anyone; an important sf theme that engages a cautionary sense of wonder; and characters who breathe with emotional life and death.

part of the Inverted Frontier series, but also a sequel to Memory, which wraps up that duology. this one is not as good as Edges, its predecessor in the Inverted Frontier series, largely because the tone of Memory, its more fantasy-derived characters and its planetary world, is not a good match for that of the Inverted Frontier deep-space ships of its far future. but it's an interesting story all the same.½

Nagata's series The Nanotech Succession occurs in the same universe (but aeons earlier) as the duology Inverted Frontier, of which this is the first book (Silver follows it). it presents a very far future for humanity among the stars. here a godlike entity threatens the human race's precarious survival. written in a stiff Stapledon style that suits the vast sweep of the canvas, this is nevertheless a stirring vision of how the human race might evolve and change in order to survive, with vivid characters and a lot of action, and is a must-read for anyone interested in hard sf. it's also got some interesting things to say about godlike entities, how they might present to less advanced populations, and the risks they represent, all within a far future context, and that's a lot of fun to consider.

I liked this a little more than the first two. Felt like it had more character arc, somewhat more coherence, and tied up a lot of loose ends.

The opening sure hooks you up - interesting characters, promising plot, fast pace. But then the author ran out of ideas and for the rest of the book you feel like you're watching a Steven Seagal movie. I can't believe I endured this all the way through, I should've cut my losses much sooner.

entertaining and engaging but didn't work quite as week as the first book. Maybe suffers a little because it is the second in a trilogy. looking forward to book 3