yet another V

[pynchonoid]

Monday, December 4, 2006
Sun of Suns: novel of sky-pirates, awesome
worldbuilding
Karl Schroeder's new novel, Sun of Suns is the first
book in a thrilling new
steampunk/post-singularity/space-opera trilogy that is
the finest and weirdest worldbuilding I can remember
reading.

Virga is a world made of a giant pressurized fullerene
balloon with an artificial sun at its center. Its
volume is full of weirdly medieval people, who are
largely ignorant of the true nature of their world.
They harvest wood from the trees that cling to
asteroids and use the lumber to build ring-shaped
settlements which they spin up with bicycles to create
local gravity, which prevents them from atrophying
into horrific, misshapen spindly monsters. They lash
these together to make nation states, and light them
with smaller artificial suns that they light by means
of miniatures of the artificial sun, which they light
by following a recipe whose origin is lost to fable.

They build navies of ships that ply the low-gravity
spaces between the nations and they wage glorious,
weird, amazing wars in those spaces, with
kerosene-powered rockets and rifles and sabers.

Sun of Suns is an incomparable adventure story. The
naval battles and swordfights alone are enough to
justify the purchase price. But as we follow Hayden,
the story's boy-hero (orphaned when his parents'
guerrilla mini-sun was blown up by a conquering
nation, raised by sky-pirates) through his involvement
in an unlikely quest to save another nation from a
tribe of marauders, we discover even stranger truths
about the universe outside of Virga, a strange place
where Artificial Reality, governed by post-Singularity
beings, is the rule of the day and the universe lacks
all rules. [...] 


http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/04/sun_of_suns_novel_of.html



 
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