I've never met anyone who has read this, and is pure gold. Hard sci-fi of the likes you'll never see again.
Maybe that's why nobody finishes it. Too heavy, only a science nerd would like it.
I for one love it. Neurological vampires, with realistic space travel and a believable pre-singularity society. And it's free to boot, CC licensed.
Name:
Anonymous2009-01-27 23:22
>>1
I haven't read it but I promise I will, because the Rifters trilogy still blows my mind every time I think of it. But first I have to finish Ian McDonald - Brasyl and David Marusek - Counting Heads which promise to be roughly as awesome.
Imagine you are Siri Keeton:
You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.
You'd scream if you had the breath.
Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.