The novel is set in the same fictional setting as Reynolds' novella "Thousandth Night", which appears in the anthology One Million A. They take a detour to contact a posthuman known as ‘Ateshga’ in hopes of getting a replacement ship for Campion because his is getting old (several million years old). There Is No Kill Like Overkill: When the shatterlings' reunion world is destroyed by the entities trying to wipe out the Gentian Line: the world is bombarded from orbit and it's atmosphere is boiled off from the sheer energies of the onslaught. Unlike Abigail, I have not cloned myself into a thousand shatterlings, sent them to explore the universe, to accumulate knowledge for the sake of it, and meet regularly to share it, all to satisfy an “insane craving to gorge.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. As an aside, the modern timeline also seems to be about a female Shatterling's emotional connection to her current companion, Campion, and a Machine Person.Childhood memories have already played an essential role in Chasm City, where it was part of showing the special attitude and shock frosted living cargo weight minimization attempts of Sky Hausmann. I think I read that Reynolds has thrown out the continuity of Thousandth Night because there are characters who appear in both that were killed off in that one, or something.

Most the long-lived characters tend to hold a rough cliff-notes version of their memories in their heads, but not any of the details; the main character Campion intentionally prioritizes his "recent" memories, which in part drives the main plot.The whole thing is written in first person, with two main point of view characters in alternating chapters. The general story is about a society/culture that tried to find a way of being and seeking some form of enlightened human experience within that constraint. The tension that finally developed a good third into the book dissipated quickly, and the more I read the more disappointed I was about the neatly resolved plot points. He's presented as a much more "organic" being -- and there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from the way machine intelligences are presented in this book. Cadence and Cascade hack into the ship's computer, taking it over, and take off from Neume with Hesperus and Purslane still aboard.