Tony Daniel (1) (1963–)

I loved this book. Let's just get that out of the way. I could hardly put it down. But, duty comes calling on all of us eventually, so I did force myself to. Reluctantly. And itched to pick it back up again. That five-star rating sorely tempted me, but... I will also be the first to admit it has some problems. Call it a 4.49. Let's dispense with those problem first so I can get on to gushing about the good stuff.

The first, and not everyone (me included) will necessarily agree this is a problem, is that it tosses you right in with zero exposition or explanation. But to be fair, Daniel created a big, complex world quite different from ours, and you are not going to understand a lot of the terminology he tosses around at the start. Understandably, this turned off more than a few readers, which is a shame (see "I loved this book" above).

What was weird in light of this utter absence of lexicography, was that in the middle of the book, he infodumps like a champ. I feel like, well, if you're going to do that sort of thing, you could help your readers at the start a bit too. Again, the beginning unfamiliarity didn't bother me, and if you stick with it and pay attention to the basic meanings of the terms he uses, you can sort things out eventually.

So, a matter of taste, though I sympathize easily with those who were turned off by it, especially given the level of exposition in the middle of the book. (That midway exposition, by the way, was nicely done, and I enjoyed it as much as I did sorting out what the hell was going on at the start.)

The bigger knock I have is the cartoonishly evil bad guys (not in every case, but most of them). A pack of sociopaths led by a megalomaniac, with the goal of take over everything and torture and kill the opposition or those you don't like. Kinda boring if you're looking for some moral complexity. I can't really excuse this as I can the choice to toss the reader in the deep end at the start, which I see as a matter of taste as much as anything else.

The writing is a bit uneven. At times great, at others, a bit cringe. I think this stems from Daniel having a shit ton of ideas in his head he wanted to pack into this book and maybe being a bit manic to give them all their due. I know I would have been. It might have benefited from a stronger editorial hand.

All that said, this book does indeed pack an amazingly cool set of ideas into it. Just fantastic stuff. And Daniel created characters equal to the coolness of the setting. Neither overshadows the other. I got into so many of them.

Sometimes synopses get things wrong or overstate to the point of obscurity. The synopsis (at least on Goodreads of the edition I read) has phrases such as "boundlessly inventive," "brilliantly dreams the future," and "reinvents humanity." None of these overstate if you ask me.

There is a plurality of humanity, real and virtual and a mix of the two, that I can't recall seeing elsewhere. Oh, and people are spaceships too, in case you were wondering. They can be arrays of personalities with presences spread across the solar system. Physical humans can marry purely virtual humans (and reproduce!).

The idea of the Met, the engineering feat of the linking the inner planets up via kilometer thick super-physics cables, staggers. I feel like it should be ridiculous. Okay, sure, maybe in a fantasy novel, you could get away with that, it wouldn't seem ridiculous. But Daniel pulls it off here, courtesy of some invented physics cleverly explained and millennium-distant descendants being vastly more advanced than us.

Because everyone has access to virtuality, few people travel far physically, and those who live on planets less friendly to human live have bodies adapted to the local environment. This includes space itself. Cool! Who wouldn't want to be adapted to survive (at least for a while) in space or live on Triton?

I haven't even touched on the environment of the Met itself, the 'grist' the nanotech substrate that functions as a pervasive network and cloud computing platform, Star Trek-esque replicator, and can be twisted into viral forms for both physical and cyber warfare.

The beginning of this will confuse the hell out of you, but stick with it, because the amazing ideas and engaging characters will kick in soon enough, and you won't want to put it down.
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Daniel, Tony. Guardian of Night. Baen, 2012.
Tony Daniel, who should not be confused with comic book writer Tony S. Daniel, has written a few Star Trek novels, but he may be best at military space opera. In Guardian of Night, humanity is recovering from a devastating attack by a militaristic race humans call sceeve. The attack has unified humanity but has worsened a rift in Guardian culture. Losing the first battle has given humanity a technological spurt. Meanwhile, the Guardians are massing an armada for a second assault, when one of our patrol ships picks up an encrypted message from a sceeve defector. There is plenty of character drama on both sides, but frankly, the sceeve are more interesting than the people, but our AIs are more fun than theirs.
The sceeve characters have all the emotional and political conflicts that we usually associate with human characters. Daniel is efficient in conveying the otherness of the sceeve. Consider this throwaway line: “Malako touched a hand to his lower muzzle, stroked a membrane, considering.” No further description is needed to tell us how nonhuman this sceeve is.
Daniel also discusses the physics of star drives in plausible ways. As he told one reviewer, he wanted to write a tech thriller with explosions. Human AIs are fully conscious and at least one serves as the executive officer on a starship. She usually displays a holographic avatar that looks female and human. She has meaningful conversations with the ship’s captain and plays an important role in the plot but never fully crosses the uncanny valley. 4 stars.… (más)

Pretty good military space opera. Lots of space ships which is good. Some dense science extrapolation which I didn't bother to really wrap my head around since I know my brain doesn't work that way or I would have become a theoretical physicist like Sheldon Cooper. Still the space ship designs were way cool. Kind of like Wonder Woman's airplane.

The aliens were very well done physically and I loved how they communicated with smells. That was a fun concept to read about. Like a lot of military sci fi there were quite a few characters which worked pretty well for the plot. Characterization wasn't too in depth. Still the author made an effort to make the characters different and distinctive. The ship captain who was a thrill seeker was a very cool character. Everything in space was an amusement park ride to him. And I'd think that that sort of person would be a good fit for going to space. I also liked Japp who was in the opening sequence and then just a bit farther in the book. Somehow you just got her with a few light touches. The alien was pretty nice too. Although their thinking didn't seem too foreign, there was enough oddities built into their culture to make their thinking reasonably alien.

All in all, a pretty solid military space opera for us lovers of that sort of thing.… (más)