Further: Beyond the Threshold [Kindle Edition]

That's more or less my opinion of this book.

The story is otherwise sound if a bit Buck Rogers or Arthur C Clarke's 3000. Astronaut is deep frozen and thawed out in the far future, where humanity moves about the galaxy via wormhole gates and has 'uplifted' other species to full sentience. add in a deep-space mission to hunt for signs of non-human life and you have a fairly decent potboiler SciFi novel.

However it hits the buffers by being as dull as September in Norway. Why hasn't the author spent time setting the scene? For instance the travel gates. Neal Asher, in his novels, has built up a picture of the Runcible network with a whole mythology of their own whereas in Further they may as well have been a display of doorframes in B&Q. Description of just about everything is either extremely poor or non-existent and that leaves too many gaps to fill in the imagination of the reader.

To tell a story like this, twelve thousand years in the future, you have to dress the stage. Performing it, with its strangeness and man-out-of-time centrepiece, just cannot be done on a bare minimum of description. Economy of words is very fine in some literature but in this piece of SciFi it isn't so much an economy as a famine.

It really needs to be padded out with a little literary colour, otherwise it is a fairly bland and unenjoyable slab of soggy science fiction.

This pays homage to previous generations of writers, like Heinlein and the kind of "Gung Ho" Science Fiction era of Flash Gordon. Our hero - RJ Stone - is brought up on this kind of story and is one of those mythical explorers who just want to see what's "out there".

This book is given extra colour, by that fact of placing Stone many thousands of years into his future and a technology beyond his or our, wildest dreams. The cast of characters involves every type of being you could imagine - although all are evolved from the basic forms of life we know today.

What still drives the future society and the plot of this book, is the search for anything extra-terrestrial in origin. As, despite the vast resources available and time allowed, nothing has been discovered that didn't originate on our own Earth. Maybe the author is describing the actual effort required, given the infinite size of the Universe or maybe he is leaving this avenue open for future books?

Apart from the references to previous Sci Fi authors and the "in-jokes", we do get a fair amount of discussion of the "big ideas" that obsess mankind - such as the nature of existence. If our consciousness is uploaded, do we actually die - are we the same person?

There are many possibilities for cheating death in the future described here - but Roberson explores how they may all be seen as false hopes. Even an artficial intelligence like Xerxes, clings to this existence as the only certainty - despite knowing that his experiences will continue after he updates his progenitors. Similarly, no matter how many duplicates Jida makes - the loss of an individual is no less keenly felt.

The other serious idea explored is how societies stagnate and they can easily devolve into self-absorbtion and in-fighting. The Entelechy needs the fresh blood of Stone to shake them up and give them purpose. They need to recover a sense of urgency or will do nothing.

Overall though - this book is fun - it is a romp through a Sci Fi writers' playground of impossible things and impossible characters. Stone sees humour in it all and enjoys his situation - he can cut through the endless amounts of information and make things happen. There is a lot of science thrown in, but like its main hero, the reader doesn't need to understand any of this to follow the plot. There is action, excitement and it all plunges to a thrilling end, which leaves you satisfied and wanting more. No doubt there will be further adventures and if they are as enjoyable as this, I look forward to reading them.

That's 12,000 years plus in the future without any back to the stone age disasters in between. This is immediately sets up the argument (which I've seen argued elsewhere) that such a period of development would create a society incomprehensible to modern man. I disagree for a couple of reasons. The first is that we are already technologically advanced and just because we can't understand how something futuristic works doesn't mean we don't recognise it for what it is i.e. the product of science. Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, or in words to this effect, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This sounds a clever thing to say when he said it decades ago but looking at it now it just sounds glib. It doesn't look like magic to our eyes, it just looks like technology. The second reason is that, while it goes without saying that society will be vastly different in the future, it's unlikely that our basic intelligence will have changed much.

What Roberson does is to create and deftly portray to the reader just such an advanced society as seen through the eyes of an astronaut born a couple of centuries hence. The first half is concerned with our hero RJ finding his way in the new world and the second with his command of the first ever FTL spaceship. I should note that thousands of worlds have been populated by means of gates and get there is as easy as walking through a door. There's a varied collection of supporting characters, some human, some A1, some enhanced animals (including cats, dogs, chimpanzees and killer whales), but all intelligences are considered by society to be human. Except for...

Which is where the conflict comes in and the novel climaxes with an encounter with the 'except for'. It's all very readable and a promising start to this new trilogy. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the next one.