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The Golden Age
 
 
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The Golden Age (Hardcover)

by John C. Wright (Author) "On the hundred-and-first night of the Millennial Celebration, Phaethon walked away from the lights and music, movement and gaiety of the golden palace-city, and out..." (more)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Saint Martin's Press Inc.; First edition (31 Oct 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0312848706
  • ISBN-13: 978-0312848705
  • Product Dimensions: 24.3 x 16.3 x 2.9 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 2,045,275 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

"T"he Golden Age" offers an intriguing and stunning look at future society - and its problems."--L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
"Think Coleridge and Xanadu -- except this is no fragment, but a beautifully realized, sprawling space epic of an evolved humanized solar system teeming with artificial intelligences and life-forms. Wright wields a poetic vision that is at once intimate and intricate yet vast and dazzling. I'm pretty sure the last novel I read like this was by Olaf Stapledon." - -Paul Levinson, author of "The Consciousness Plague"
""The Golden Age" is aptly titled -- it evokes the best of the golden age of science fiction.
Transcendence, big ideas, slam-bang action -- it's all here, in the first significant debut of the new millennium."- Robert J. Sawyer, Nebula Award winner and author of "Hominids "


Product Description

Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified encounters an old man who accuses him of being an imposter and an allen from Neptune who reveals that he has had essential parts of his memory removed. THE GOLDEN AGE is a grand space opera, a large-scale SF adventure novel in the tradition of A. E. Van Vogt and Roger Zelazny (with perhaps a bit of Cordwainer Smith enriching the style). It is a thrilling wonder story that recaptures the excitements of SF's golden age writers.
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On the hundred-and-first night of the Millennial Celebration, Phaethon walked away from the lights and music, movement and gaiety of the golden palace-city, and out into the solitude of the groves and gardens beyond. Read the first page
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Book, 8 Nov 2003
This review is from: The Golden Age (Mass Market Paperback)
(There should be no spoilers here. Most of the information revealed is presented in the first few pages of the book)

It is the time of the masquerade hosted this time by the electrophotonic self-aware entity Aurelian. A sophotech of the Golden Oecumene. All posthumans and nonhumans of the Golden Oecumene have come to participate. Actual, fictional, composition-assisted reconstructions, extrapolated demigoddesses from imagined superhuman futures, lamia from unrealized alternatives and on the active channels of the mentality, recidivists returned from high transhuman states of mind.

The Golden Age is full of ideas, mythological references and wondrous sights and scenes. In fact so much it can be a bit overwhelming sometimes. Especially the first part of the book can seem daunting but the pages turn faster and faster until it becomes impossible to stop. The story is about Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 7043 (the “Reawakening”) and a great mystery about his past that he cannot remember.

An absorbing tale is told of Phaethon’s one man struggle against society, posing interesting philosophical and moral questions. Although over dramatized at times it is an intelligent and beautiful look at a possible future of technological utopia. Foremost though it is a story about Phaethon.

I can’t wait to read the second part and then to read it all a second time.

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Individual Vs Society part One, 31 Jan 2004
By Ventura Angelo (Brescia, Lombardia Italy) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Golden Age (Mass Market Paperback)
Phaeton is an ideally satisfied citizen and member of the Golden Transcendence Sun-System spanning Civilization. Oh, how it's all perfect, artistically enjoyable and fit for the most elevated sentient needs! Two encounters in a garden will persuade him otherwise. He, apparently, has a past not in accordance to the satisfied conformist that he's been led to believe to be. And the Illuminated Government of Utopia may not have the best interest of the citizens in mind.
Phaeton will undertake a search for its true identity that will reveal that all is not well in Utopia.
I love the baroque style and the inventiveness of situations. A well crafted series, that recalls something of Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Captivating ideas, prose and pace... which falls apart by the second sentance., 24 Jul 2008
By eidolon (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Golden Age (Mass Market Paperback)
If you are considering buying this book, BROWSE THE SAMPLE PAGES and don't just rely on the glowing editorial books. You'll either love (as most do) this book or hate it and consider it a complete waste of time (as I did).

Wright cloaks his story behind long strings of almost meaningless words. "Noumeal" instead of "mental", for example. On top of this, the Author is Overly Fond of Using Capitals, which Lends a Presumptuous Air to his Work. This gets Very Irritiating, Very Quickly. As does his insistence on using very big numbers to lend a sense of grandiosity to the story. Using big numbers was impressive in the days of Doc E. E. Smith and the Galactic Lensmen. Nowdays it is just looks silly.

Some of the ideas in the book are interesting, perhaps even original. However, they are inconsistently mixed in with anachronisms that make no sense in a futuristic context. For example:

- Why does a society that is set in at least 5000AD (the protagonist is 3000 years old) still use the British legal system ? There is a court scene replete with barristers and case references. Surely any SF author worth his salt would not think that English case law is not the ultimate evolution in human legal history?

- Why are there still fashions based on geography (eg European clothing fashion) when most of the story is based in a virtual world and independent of location?

- Why does time move *faster* in the real world than the virtual? The main character decides to take a break from the virtual, and does so by unplugging. He has time to walk around before returing, to find that all the independent entities in the virtual world was exactly as he left them. If anything, the virutal world should move faster than the real world (due to processing power) and independent entities should not be "frozen" every time someone unplugs.

Perhaps answers to these questions appear later in the book. I could only read a third of it before giving up- I simply fould the inconsistencies and the prose too painful wade through to find out. Nor am I by any means an overly picky reader- I am a voracious consumer of science fiction, and revel in anything from grand (Ian M. Banks, Peter Hamilton) to classic (Asimov) to cheesy space opera (McMaster Bujold) to boys-own-adventure (Timothy Zahn).

This was in all seriousness the worst-written book I'd tried to read for years.


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