he distant star system named Upsilon Aquarius boasts one barely habitable planet, which the colonists from Earth aboard the Frank Tipler have named Adrasteia. Seeking to settle the planet and discover new information about the cosmos, the two dozen crewmembers—who have been out of contact with the Earth that sent them on their sublight journey for many decades—are limited by a peculiar condition. The crew are all engrams, software replications of the original human volunteers back home, living in a virtual environment aboard the Tipler and interacting with the real world through various machines. This tactic was followed both to save mass and so as not to risk the lives of real humans. But certain drawbacks have cropped up. One engram—our protagonist, Peter Alander—has suffered a nervous breakdown in the virtual environment, and been saved only by exile to a vat-grown android body. Currently he is the only physically embodied crewmember. This might be a partial explanation for why he is chosen by the aliens who arrive one day as the sole person they will deal with.
On that pivotal day a single mysterious ship that soon departs seeds the atmosphere of Adrasteia with mechanisms that almost instantly construct a ring of space elevators around the planet. Each node is filled with miraculous high-tech gifts from a race dubbed the Spinners, administered by a bank of AIs who will accept their orders only from Alander. Naturally, his fellows rankle at the new status of their weakest link, and much dissension occurs. But their captain, Caryl Hatzis, establishes a method of working, and they began to explore the new riches, which include a faster-than-light ship. Finally, after discussions and arguments, it is decided that Alander will use the new ship to return to Earth and inform them of this unexpected boon.
Upon arriving back at the solar system, however, Alander gets a shocking surprise. Shortly after the Tipler left on its mission, the Spike occurred—that long-predicted moment when AIs would overtake their creators and initiate an era with unforeseen consequences. In this case, the Spike aftermath included the dismantling of the Earth and Venus for the construction of a Dyson Sphere and the death of billions. But currently, the several million humans left alive are resurgent, in the wake of the AIs crashing. They live throughout the System, mostly in the unfinished Shell of the Dyson Sphere project, and have powers closer to the Spinners than to the old-time humans. Alander would be adrift, save for the presence of the last of the original humans who supplied the engrams: Caryl Hatzis. As his contact, she is motivated by the goals of her own contemporary culture, not his. But the plans of both Alander and Hatzis soon come to naught, as yet another set of aliens arrives, this time bearing not gifts but weapons.
Ambitious space opera
Readers who enjoyed Greg Bear's duology, The Forge of God (1987) and Anvil of Stars (1992), in which Earth was destroyed and a small remnant of humanity was left to wreak vengeance, will certainly find similar thrills in this new novel from the Aussie writing team who previously offered us the ambitious space opera known as the Evergence trilogy. Additionally, fans of Linda Nagata and Greg Egan would be well advised to sample this book, the former group for the novel's sense of cutting-edge interstellar mystery and the latter for its extrapolation of virtual communities as a novel mode of space exploration.
Williams and Dix exhibit a nicely unified writing style, smooth and seamless and able to convey complex ideas and actions pellucidly. In this sense they follow in the immediate footsteps of William Barton and Michael Capobianco, whose Alpha Centauri (1997) conjures up a similar mood of tiny humans exposed to the vast wonders of an alien world. If Dix and Williams fail to burst fully through conceptual barriers into truly startling new paradigms as, say, Greg Bear does, it's not for lack of effort and intelligence. They invest their plot with intriguing new speculations that nonetheless flow smoothly from old tropes and gimmicks. (The guardian AIs of the Spinner gifts are, not accidentally, encased in monoliths that hark back to a certain Clarkean conception.)
Peter Alander is, of dramatic necessity, the best-drawn character here, a damaged soul trying to overcome the congenital limitations of being "born" an engram, and his distress at not being able to recapture the entire dimensions of his human model is touching. Second in depth is Caryl Hatzis, whose post-Spike existence as a distributed intelligence is made tangible by the authors. Together, Hatzis and Alander make for a real odd couple, and the tension between them in crisis situations adds a useful dimension to the tale.
In a universe where so many verities have changed, the titular echoes of Earth are the forgotten and despised engrams, archaic castoffs of the superior post-Spike culture. How ironic, then, that the fate of all humanity lies with them. This underdog triumphant theme is just one of the many fine things about this well-conceived and capably executed book.
