author : Linda Nagata

Katie Kishida's husband Tom has died in a tragic accident. Yet death is not necessarily final -- they are both members of Forward Futures Inc, a cryotech company who preserve the dead while waiting for a cure. So Katie has Tom frozen. But Tom's sister, Senator Ilene Carson, is a prominent advocate of sustainable health care -- and comes out hard against expensive life extension technologies. The next thirty years are a battle as Katie struggles to find a Cure, and Ilene works to make that technology illegal.

Usually stories of cryonics are from the point of view of the frozen one -- waking up in a vastly altered world. But here we get a thoughtful look from the point of view of those left behind when one family member is dead but not gone -- while Tom lies frozen, how can Katie get on with her own life?

The beginning, with its description of the freezing process, and the conclusion move along at a brisk pace. The middle third of the book -- as Katie lives through decades herself in a kind of suspended animation -- is necessarily rather episodic, and I found it a little slow. That is because I would have liked more exploration of the actual nanotechnology being developed as the Cure, but that happens only in the background; it is Katie's strangely frozen life that is the foreground. But I did like the way the gradually developing tech is integrated into the story -- the VR, the remotes, the orbitals. (And Nagata has great term for that contrast to Virtual Reality -- which we sometimes find ourselves calling 'Real' Reality -- here it is Cold Reality.)

In a complex universe a few thousand years in the future, humanity has spread to the stars, but all is not well: the ancient Chenzeme war is still being waged by its remaining machines, using exotic weapons and nanotech in its attempt to wipe out all sentient life. Safe from the war for the moment, Silk is an orbital city connected by a beanstalk to the world called Deception Well. The inhabitants of Silk say the Well is dangerous, but the charismatic leader Jupiter declares it is a place of Commune, where all can be cured. He leads his party of fanatical followers down to Silk, where most are killed before reaching the planet. His young son Lot gets left behind. Ten years later, the grown Lot gathers his own followers for a descent to the surface. But all is not as he believes.

This is a complex and detailed world, with gradually revealed layers of deception and meaning. The technology might seem semi-miraculous to us, but Nagata saves us the info-dumping, leaving the healing properties of the nanotech makers, the networked brain augmentations, and the history of how the universe ended up this way, as ordinary everyday background in the story. The gradual exposure of plot points mean that we learn along with Lot what is going on, sharing his confusion along the way (which doesn't stop me wanting to shout "don't be so stupidly pig-headed" or "stop being a whiny teenager" at him several times). Although there is a sequel, the ending provides sufficient closure to this part of the story.

(Warning: minor spoilers for Deception Well)

Lot, Urban and Clementine have left the city of Silk in the ship Null Boundary with its damaged pilot Nikko, searching for the source of the Chenzeme scourge. The trip lasts many hundreds of years, and they discover much about themselves, the Chenzeme factions, and the rest of star-dwelling humanity -- none of it expected.

This has a tremendous feeling of the sheer timescales involved in their sub-light interstellar travels. There are a few clever tricks involved, the most effective being the massive 200-year-old trees growing in the ship's interior, seeded as it left Silk. There are also clever unravellings of layers of Chenzeme menace, with many unexpected twists. But the best bits, for me, are the feeling of how different these people are, what a different world view they have, being able to spawn and reintegrate alternate personalities -- "ghosts" -- with casual ease.

Some things are never explained (or if they are, I missed the explanations). For example, the direction they go in search of the Chenzeme is the direction known as swan -- the characters don't know why, the reason is lost in history, but it's in the direction of the constellation Cygnus, and they actually pass very close to Alpha Cygni. Fair enough -- but one of the main characters is called Deneb (which is also the name of Alpha Cygni) -- I kept waiting for this to become important, but nothing is ever made of it. Is it just a little joke -- or did I miss a significant plot point?

There is a satisfactory form of closure to the story, although it's not an ending, it's more of a temporary pause in an ongoing, ever-increasingly complex universe. Which, after all, is much more satisfying than an "end".