The Golden Age, by John C. Wright
review, comparison and contrast with OA
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The Golden Age, by John C. Wrightreview, comparison and contrast with OA |
Todd already has written a good review of this book, and it was on that recommendation that I bought and read a copy.
Having read it, I decided to write a short review, drawing on specific comparison (similarities and contrasts) to Orion's Arm. Todd gives a very good synopsis of the basic story, so I'll avoid any references to the story, to avoid spoilers. However, anyone buying this book should be aware that it ends on a cliffhanger; an infuriating practice that I previously thought was only limited to writers and publishers of mediocre fantasy genre. So you need to get the sequels as well (it's actually a trilogy, the sequel likewise ends on a suspenseful note; but in any case this is very bad form for both writer and publisher)
To the book now. More than any other work of sci fi I've read, The Golden Age invokes the sort of technology and lifestyles one might expect to find in any human-friendly ultra tech world or megastructure in OA. The Solar System out to Saturn is portrayed as a sort of Kardashev II libertarian-utopia, called "The Golden Oekumene". There is dazzling richness of experiences that would bewilder an ordinary baseline human, pervasive advanced nanotech, data-filters and data-enhancers, virtual reality (the Dreaming (with levels - middle, deep, etc) and the Mentality, although it - very interestingly, also overlaps with real life), benevolent superhuman AI (called sophotechs in the book) maintaining and governing everything, diverse clades (called "neuroforms"), copies, vast megastructures, stellar engineering, memory redaction, Manorials and Schola (somewhat like the Houses of OA, but not exactly the same) and more, much more, all within a hard science perspective and a literary richness that is rare in sci fi.
Of course there are important differences as well. Unlike the sophotechs, the ruling AIs in OA - even the most hu friendly ones - have not the slightest obligation to serve man, they have their own agendas, and there are whole toposophic ecologies above the SI:<1 sapient level. Crime - rather than being an abhorrent unthinkable act as it is in The Golden Age - is simply prevented by angelnets, and any one who tries it finds his neural pathways rewritten. Sephirotic Civilization is ever vibrant and expansive, not frozen and fixed to a single solar system. The governing plutocracy (the 7 fabulously wealthy ruling peers) of the Golden Oekumene might be found in some NoCoZo worlds, but not elsewhere. The incredible richness and beauty of Wright's future society, rather than constitute a creation of the Mentality, would actually represent how things really physically are in a sephirotic ultratech society. And the advertisements are so easily blocked out by data-filters that even the wimpiest madvert seems like a superbeing in comparison
While Wright's worldbuilding is of OA-standards in richness (although in this case only limited to a single solar system, but still the detail and sheer amount of material), the narrative pace frequently drags, which makes reading the book tedious. Just when the action starts to pick up, he switches to a 5 page description of the scenery or the capacities of one of the characters, or a 3 page flashback. Not since I read Zindell (who similarly burdens his narrative with pages and pages of description - even inserting long descriptive paragraphs in the middle of a fight or other action scene) have I seen such a tedious pace. Yet at the same time, this, the story's weakness, is also its strength. For while the actual plot is pretty average, and made all the more annoying by the fact that the book ends only half-way through the story, the sheer richness of these descriptive passages, both stylistically and in terms of the technology (which as I said would fit perfectly in OA - indeed it seems that often entire passages could be translated verbatim into an OA setting; the humans in Banks' Culture seem like a bunch of prims in comparison! This is what makes the book so exceptional, and the reason why I would recommend it to any OA worldbuilder or enthusiast.
