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.

( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

A space quest to determine what happened to the human homeworlds, games of deception played against alien berserker ships in deep space, and a mysterious castaway who wants to hijack that quest for his own ends – this novel returns to the universe of Nagata’s Nanotech Succession and takes place shortly after Vast.

Nagata says she crafted this to be a new entry point into the series, and she succeeded. I remembered little of the last two novels of the series, Deception Well and Vast and was able to pick up on the story quickly.

The Inverted Frontier of the title refers to the center of humanity’s expansion into space, the core from which man expanded outward. That core, the Hallowed Vasties, seems to have undergone some great change, the Dyson swarms around its suns have been dismantled. Thus humanity, at least in its altered version, exists only on the fringe planet of Deception Well.

The story opens with a Chenzeme courser approaching that planet. It’s not a welcome event, but it is one that has been prepared for since humanity fought a war against the Chenzeme, a mysterious alien race extensively using biological modifications and nanotech in its spaceships.

But the ship, the Dragon, turns out to unexpectedly be in friendly hands. Urban, part of the expedition at the center of Vast, has returned to Deception Well with a ship he commands. He’s imposed his will on the ship’s alien sentient technology, an experience later likened to having a foot on a murderer’s throat.

Urban’s not stopping at Deception Well, not even slowing down, but headed towards the Hallowed Vasties to see what happened there. He puts the call out for 10 volunteers to go with him.

He especially wants the local version of Clemantine, his old lover who went with him on that expedition, to join him.

Her body is revived from its “sleep” and her “ghost”, an electronic recording of her personality and memories, is beamed to the ship along with the unexpectedly large number of Deception Well inhabitants, 60 in all, that want to join Urban’s expedition.

Reminiscent of some of Peter F. Hamilton’s work, Nagata comes up with several uses and implications for the idea that human consciousness can be recorded, the resulting data modified and pruned and duplicated and incorporated into bodies. For instance, one of the volunteers memorably has trouble following Urban’s example of casually creating bodies, putting a ghost in them, and using them as disposable reconnaissance units. Also, there are not the resources to let all the volunteers incarnate physically, so their ghosts must inhabit the ship’s computer system.

But, when the ship meets, in the ruins of a world, a mysterious human called Lezuri who wants to use the Dragon for his own ends, a struggle for the ship and the fate of the expedition kicks into high gear.

While I criticized Vast for being a bit slow in parts, that certainly was not the case in this book of over 400 pages. Nagata quickly presents conflicts and resolves them and throws new ones up. Is Urban, showing up in a Chenzeme ship, trustworthy? Is Lezuri’s distress signal a trap? Can he be trusted?

Again, I’m impressed by how much emotion Nagata gets out of such sparse prose. She gives us jealous characters and shows how some of them become more hardened and ruthless as the novel progresses.

Nagata has never treated nanotechnology as magic. While her use of that now omnipresent bit of sf hardware is not as detailed as Wil McCarthy’s Bloom, she still treats it as a technology with limitations. It takes time to work. It generates heat. It needs the relevant raw materials, and it is not invulnerable. It’s possible I wasn’t paying close enough attention when reading Vast, but I think her explanations of Chenzeme technology are clearer here.
I did have a couple of quibbles.

First, Vytet, who is constantly changing her appearance and sex, seems a sop to modern transgender obsessions. To be fair, though, body switching and gender swapping has been a sf thing since at least John Varley. Even Poul Anderson, in The Boat of a Million Years, had characters undergoing sex change.

Second, I’m not sure why she decided to narrate the interludes with Vytet in the currently trendy second person. She could have kept their immediacy and mystery and used traditional third person voice. ( )

Spliffs and vinyl are so old “skool”. In the New-Couldn't-Give-A-Rat's-Arse-About-Putting-Myself-In-A -Vibrant-New-Groundbreaking-Literary/Artistic-SF-Movement I snort coke off the backs of half-naked SF writers...I hate the Mundane in SF. Cyberpunk, near-future SF, New Wave - all these other works have most of the Mundane elements in them if not all, and seem to be doing well, in back-lists or new works, as the case fits. With writers like Alastair Reynolds and Linda Nagata, I feel space-opera-ish works are in fine storytelling hands as well. Gibson still does fine work like “Pattern Recognition” as well, Willis with “The Speed of Dark too, etc., have literary merit as well as being near future and science fictiony at the same time. Or is the Mundane movement suggesting a ULYSSES whose main character has a night job as a genetic engineer or DJ?

Contemporary SF boring? Yep! Most of it anyway. Last year it seemed I had been reading the wrong SF books, I'm afraid (Peter Tillman chastised me for that...). I think there is enough tedium in literature without SF (primarily a genre of ideas) devolving into a study of the minutiae of the everyday. If you read “Edges” and still think SF is boring, you live in a bad world.

I just feel sorry that the main branch of contemporary SF has been forced to diverge into more and more subdivisions of the original, primary one (i.e., the ones with the “Sense of Wonder” predominant). How far do you go back to define when SF itself broke away from the mainstream literary branch? Was it Frankenstein? Or perhaps the work of Jules Verne? Or even as far back as perhaps Shakespeare's “The Tempest”? Then how were those works of fiction accepted by the reading fraternity of the time? Were they frowned upon and somehow relegated in literary stature (as much of SF is today?) Will SF become so subdivided into different classifications that it will eventually dissolve into mainstream once again? Mainstream readers that flinch from reading SF because of the 'geek' label that it can carry are missing so many good stories by so many good authors. Hey! you can always wrap the cover of the book in brown paper or just rip off the covers altogether, go on, give "Edges" a try, you might just enjoy it. ( )