Echoes of Earth [Mass Market Paperback]

In 2050, Earth begins to send out 1000 exploration ships containing engrams, cybernetic personality simulations, rather than actual humans. All the engram crews are based on only 60 personalities. One of these engrams, based on Peter Stanmore Alander, is particularly unstable, but all break down within a few decades.

The engram ship Frank Tipler has the mission to Upsilon Aquarius. In 2160, the ship reaches its target and the engram crew begins their mission to study the solar system. They had lost communications with Earth shortly after they left, but are confident that Earth will contact them later. Alien ships suddenly enter the UA system and build 10 orbital towers -- beanstalks -- and an interconnecting ring in only a few hours as the engrams watch. Peter Alander, who has been permanently assigned an android body to slow down his personality deterioration, enters an alien device at the bottom of one tower and is carried up to orbit. There he encounters the Gifts, 11 artificial intelligences who control the advanced technology provided by the aliens as gifts to the less advanced humans. Among these gifts are devices to communicate and travel faster than light.

The Gifts are programmed to obey only one person -- Peter Alander -- among the crew; the aliens, who the engrams call Spinners, apparently want the Gift recipients to absorb the new technology slowly to reduce cultural shock. However, the other engrams can operate the alien technology after learning the control interface protocols. Since the other engrams are running on the computers within the Frank Tipler and controlling drones remotely, Peter is the only engram that can operate the FTL ship at this time. After secret programming in one of the engrams almost destroys the mission, Peter takes the FTL ship back to Earth to ensure that information on the Spinner technology is not lost.

The Solar System has changed drastically since the Frank Tipler left. The artificial intelligences have reached self-awareness and followed their own agenda, destroying the Earth and Venus to build the beginning of a Dyson sphere around the sun. The eruption of AI has almost wiped out the biological intelligences and only about 3 million are left. The surviving humans have incorporated cybernetic technology to form personality gestalts with multiple points of view. All these intelligences are joined to some extent into the Vincula, a sort of group mind, but some resist the conservatism of that body. One of the human gestalts is based on Caryl Hatzis, one of the engram contributors. When Alander arrives in the Solar System, he tries to contact the proper authorities, but finds that only Hatzis has survived. The Vincula tries to take the FTL ship away from him to suppress the technology, but he escapes back to UA with the original Hatzis.

This story contains little new in plot or concepts, but the level of detail makes it more immediate. It grabs your attention like a good widescreen movie. Recommended for Williams and Dix fans and anyone who enjoys the interstellar adventures of Roger MacBride Allen, Vernor Vinge, Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl.

So once again, it's the future: 2165 or around about that. It appears that by 2050, Earth had become all peaceable and stuff and also monstrously prosperous, thanks to technology. So everyone became real keen on exploring space. 'Cept that it would be really expensive and not terribly feasible to send human crews blasting around for hundreds of years to reach our nearest neighbors. So engram crews were sent instead: super-complex software recreations of actual people, or bodiless clones, if you will. This meant that the ships just basically had to be flying computers with some nanofacturing capabilities to build stuff at the destination. Also the engrams could basically ride along in stand-by mode, more or less sleeping, so as to not, you know, flip out through the sheer boredom of the long voyage.

Well, at this here one distant destination, many light years away, and a hundred years after launch time, one engram does wig out over the basic disconnect over "my memories tell me I am Peter but really I know I am a computer program in a VR environment". So his crew dumps him in an android body on the planet's surface and tells him to just kind of putter about at the base camp there and stay out of their way. They get no transmissions from Earth, so obviously something happened during the trip and the home planet cannot or will not talk to them (although of course any real-time communications would be out of the question due to the years-long time lag).

A coupla years later, the engrams are just minding their business and building robo-facilities and exploring and stuff, when, within a day, a bunch of linked orbital towers get connected via space elevator to the surface. Who built these, and how and why, are mysteries. Pete the engram/android flies over to the base of one of the tower-things and gets a free ride up to the spindle attached above, way up in orbit. Then a pack of alien AIs go all, "I am for you, Peter" and tell him, yeah, some benevolent super-aliens just did a quick fly-by and built this whole complex installation with some of their Model T-level technology, 'cuz they're all hyper-advanced but they like to throw a few crumbs at the more primitive species they encounter, to help 'em bootstrap their way up. And oh, yeah, the alien AIs will only talk to and obey Peter and no one else in the crew.

So the novel goes from there. Who are these aliens? What do they want? Are they good? Are they bad? Should the engrammites use all of the kewl toys the aliens have given them? And what has become of Earth in the meantime?

This is a tale on yer epic Clarkean scale with a bit of Vernor Vinge thrown in. Huge revelations are...um...revealed. And action takes place on literally a stellar level. Lots of big ideas get thrown around. (The authors are a little too proud of their use of the revised Planckian measurement system, but it shows how seriously they take some of their scientific gimcrackery.)

It's pretty good and definitely bold. Zesty, with a big finish and a slightly nutty aftertaste. I enjoyed it, and my cat Mr. Hate gives it his highest recommendation of "I would sleep on top of that book".

This book could have been exploded into several novels just to get to the point where the story picks up.

1. How the Earth and civilization changed during the 100 years the scouting team took to reach the star system.
2. How the scouting team developed its social and physical interactions.
3. More details on the gifts of the aliens.

Now if you don't like to dig facts out, this is probably not your book. Many aspects will keep you puzzeled until they are finaly revealed in the story line. I happened to like this but you may not. I would definitely say that there are more books coming out to make this into a trilogy because there are still some major questions left unanswered at the end of the book.

And uh, pay no attention the side plot that resembles a famous science fiction movie produced by Stanley Kubrick.

Overall, I liked it very much and I especially like the up-to-date, hard science that was put into the story. And yes, the hero-protaganist is a flawed, passive-agressive person. But it's done well. Buy it! Especially if you like hard science fiction.