Phaethon seems to be a young man who has life by the tail. The scion of a famous and respected hero, Helion, our protagonist lives in an era of unequaled wealth and possibilities. Nearly every single human alive in this far-off age is possessed of godlike powers, able to command vast energies and resources. The solar System is their playground, from the cold Neptunian depths where slow intelligences parsimoniously dwell, to the Jovian neighborhood where Jupiter, artificially ignited, functions as a second sun. Earth itself, linked to space by a number of geosynchronous beanstalks, is celebrating the High Transcendence, a festive time when paradigms will shift, opening up even more exciting prospects for art, business, science and recreation.

Why, then, is Phaethon uneasy? Because, he soon discovers, large chunks of his memory are missing. As he quickly learns, he once voluntarily underwent memory "redaction" under court orders as a punishment. Apparently, he committed some crime so heinous that only having his brain wiped clean of certain knowledge would allow him to remain free. Naturally, Phaethon is disturbed by this revelation. What did he do? Was he right to have submitted to the decree? Should he attempt to recover his lost days, or simply follow a policy of "ignorance is bliss"? His father offers no help, nor does Phaethon's wife, Daphne. A mysterious Neptunian visitor seems to promise assistance, but can this odd entity be trusted?

Phaethon's search for his ravaged past takes him across one virtual landscape after another, since much of mankind's daily routines are conducted across various levels of the Dreaming. Accompanied by the family's AI, Rhadamanthus, he navigates the shoals of the many dominant institutions, such as the Curia, the Eleemosynary Composition and the Hortators. He makes sad discoveries concerning the reality of his beloved wife, and the recent past actions of Helion. But only when his quest takes him physically off planet does he come face to face with the ultimate implications of his crimes.

Weird people do weird things in weird places

H.G. Wells famously postulated that a good SF story would feature either a bizarre character or a bizarre situation, but never both together, for that would be too much of a muchness. Yet our literature is famously rich with authors who disregarded this advice—admittedly with checkered successes and failures. The publicity surrounding John Wright's first novel namechecks A.E. van Vogt and Cordwainer Smith as illustrious forefathers to this kind of space-oddity fiction. But those two men are merely the tip of the iceberg as influences on Wright's ambitious novel, which surely takes the palm for quirky debuts. There are echoes here of E.R. Eddison, David Lindsay, Bruce Sterling, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Charles Harness, Michael Moorcock, Greg Egan, David Bunch, Felix Gotschalk and Curme Gray. As with the work of these literary ancestors, reading The Golden Age is akin to walking through a gallery full of Henry Darger's outsider art. You get the sense that vast, shadowy epics have preceded the current action, and that you will never understand the full depth of meaning being presented to you. Nonetheless, you keep reading or viewing out of sheer fascination with the exotic sights, actions and dialogue you are privileged to witness.

To try to synopsize logically the action or background of Wright's intellectually demanding universe is impossible. I'm not sure Wright himself understands as much as he thinks he understands. For one thing, the book is jam-packed full of neologisms and subverted common words that defeat easy apprehension of both concepts and events. This is a prime technique for inducing a welcome cognitive estrangement, but the approach does carry certain hindrances. Consider this passage, for instance:

The far wall of the barren apartment was made of pseudo-matter. Pseudo-matter was neither matter nor energy as the ancients would have understood those terms but a third manifestation of timespace. The vibrations of ylem superstrings in the stable geometries called "octaves" produced matter-energy quanta; unstable pulses formed temporary virtual particles. An unnatural but perfectly self-consistent topology ... was the semistable waveform dubbed the tritone. Pseudo-matter, built up from these tritone semiquanta, could impersonate shape and extension. ...

Enough of this hypnagogic prose, and backward reels the mind.

Contributing further to the occasional nebulousness of the narrative is the fact that the many multiform clades of the future conduct most of their dealings in a many-leveled virtuality. There are really very few physical locales in this book, and determining who is where doing what to whom, at what level of reality, diverts somewhat from Phaethon's quest. That's why the ending of the book—which confronts Phaethon with an almost impossible physical challenge—is so vivid by comparison to what has gone before. (It should also be mentioned that the climax is an absolute cliffhanger, with no resolution to Phaethon's problems.)

Nonetheless, this book gets high marks for its wealth of intriguing ideas (at least two per page, many of which would spark entire trilogies) and its brave attempt to build a suspenseful novel on such philosophical questions as the nature of identity and consciousness, without resorting to cheap melodrama. Wright's dauntless presentation of a world that obeys Clarke's Third Law—"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"—sometimes veers into obscurity, but it's certainly never boring.