Customer Reviews

Echoes of Earth (Orphans trilogy)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Echoes of Earth is the first novel in a new series. It is the story of the destruction of civilization in the Solar System and the discovery of aliens with greatly superior technology, combining elements of Allen's Ring of Charon, Vinge's Marooned in Real Time, Williamson's Manseed and Pohl's Heechee series.

In 2050, Earth begins to send out 1000 exploration ships containing engrams, cybernetic personality simulations, rather than actual humans. All the engram crews are based on only 60 personalities. One of these engrams, based on Peter Stanmore Alander, is particularly unstable, but all break down within a few decades.

The engram ship Frank Tipler has the mission to Upsilon Aquarius. In 2160, the ship reaches its target and the engram crew begins their mission to study the solar system. They had lost communications with Earth shortly after they left, but are confident that Earth will contact them later. Alien ships suddenly enter the UA system and build 10 orbital towers -- beanstalks -- and an interconnecting ring in only a few hours as the engrams watch. Peter Alander, who has been permanently assigned an android body to slow down his personality deterioration, enters an alien device at the bottom of one tower and is carried up to orbit. There he encounters the Gifts, 11 artificial intelligences who control the advanced technology provided by the aliens as gifts to the less advanced humans. Among these gifts are devices to communicate and travel faster than light.

The Gifts are programmed to obey only one person -- Peter Alander -- among the crew; the aliens, who the engrams call Spinners, apparently want the Gift recipients to absorb the new technology slowly to reduce cultural shock. However, the other engrams can operate the alien technology after learning the control interface protocols. Since the other engrams are running on the computers within the Frank Tipler and controlling drones remotely, Peter is the only engram that can operate the FTL ship at this time. After secret programming in one of the engrams almost destroys the mission, Peter takes the FTL ship back to Earth to ensure that information on the Spinner technology is not lost.

The Solar System has changed drastically since the Frank Tipler left. The artificial intelligences have reached self-awareness and followed their own agenda, destroying the Earth and Venus to build the beginning of a Dyson sphere around the sun. The eruption of AI has almost wiped out the biological intelligences and only about 3 million are left. The surviving humans have incorporated cybernetic technology to form personality gestalts with multiple points of view. All these intelligences are joined to some extent into the Vincula, a sort of group mind, but some resist the conservatism of that body. One of the human gestalts is based on Caryl Hatzis, one of the engram contributors. When Alander arrives in the Solar System, he tries to contact the proper authorities, but finds that only Hatzis has survived. The Vincula tries to take the FTL ship away from him to suppress the technology, but he escapes back to UA with the original Hatzis.

This story contains little new in plot or concepts, but the level of detail makes it more immediate. It grabs your attention like a good widescreen movie. Recommended for Williams and Dix fans and anyone who enjoys the interstellar adventures of Roger MacBride Allen, Vernor Vinge, Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl.

This is the first volume in a series? Trilogy? I dunno. I can say that at least two more books follow it.

So once again, it's the future: 2165 or around about that. It appears that by 2050, Earth had become all peaceable and stuff and also monstrously prosperous, thanks to technology. So everyone became real keen on exploring space. 'Cept that it would be really expensive and not terribly feasible to send human crews blasting around for hundreds of years to reach our nearest neighbors. So engram crews were sent instead: super-complex software recreations of actual people, or bodiless clones, if you will. This meant that the ships just basically had to be flying computers with some nanofacturing capabilities to build stuff at the destination. Also the engrams could basically ride along in stand-by mode, more or less sleeping, so as to not, you know, flip out through the sheer boredom of the long voyage.

Well, at this here one distant destination, many light years away, and a hundred years after launch time, one engram does wig out over the basic disconnect over "my memories tell me I am Peter but really I know I am a computer program in a VR environment". So his crew dumps him in an android body on the planet's surface and tells him to just kind of putter about at the base camp there and stay out of their way. They get no transmissions from Earth, so obviously something happened during the trip and the home planet cannot or will not talk to them (although of course any real-time communications would be out of the question due to the years-long time lag).

A coupla years later, the engrams are just minding their business and building robo-facilities and exploring and stuff, when, within a day, a bunch of linked orbital towers get connected via space elevator to the surface. Who built these, and how and why, are mysteries. Pete the engram/android flies over to the base of one of the tower-things and gets a free ride up to the spindle attached above, way up in orbit. Then a pack of alien AIs go all, "I am for you, Peter" and tell him, yeah, some benevolent super-aliens just did a quick fly-by and built this whole complex installation with some of their Model T-level technology, 'cuz they're all hyper-advanced but they like to throw a few crumbs at the more primitive species they encounter, to help 'em bootstrap their way up. And oh, yeah, the alien AIs will only talk to and obey Peter and no one else in the crew.

So the novel goes from there. Who are these aliens? What do they want? Are they good? Are they bad? Should the engrammites use all of the kewl toys the aliens have given them? And what has become of Earth in the meantime?

This is a tale on yer epic Clarkean scale with a bit of Vernor Vinge thrown in. Huge revelations are...um...revealed. And action takes place on literally a stellar level. Lots of big ideas get thrown around. (The authors are a little too proud of their use of the revised Planckian measurement system, but it shows how seriously they take some of their scientific gimcrackery.)

It's pretty good and definitely bold. Zesty, with a big finish and a slightly nutty aftertaste. I enjoyed it, and my cat Mr. Hate gives it his highest recommendation of "I would sleep on top of that book".

Many different possible story lines in this one.

This book could have been exploded into several novels just to get to the point where the story picks up.

1. How the Earth and civilization changed during the 100 years the scouting team took to reach the star system.
2. How the scouting team developed its social and physical interactions.
3. More details on the gifts of the aliens.

Now if you don't like to dig facts out, this is probably not your book. Many aspects will keep you puzzeled until they are finaly revealed in the story line. I happened to like this but you may not. I would definitely say that there are more books coming out to make this into a trilogy because there are still some major questions left unanswered at the end of the book.

And uh, pay no attention the side plot that resembles a famous science fiction movie produced by Stanley Kubrick.

Overall, I liked it very much and I especially like the up-to-date, hard science that was put into the story. And yes, the hero-protaganist is a flawed, passive-agressive person. But it's done well. Buy it! Especially if you like hard science fiction.

Maybe it's just me, but I found this book hard to really like. It has some good elements: the aliens are intriguing and so is the technology, both human and alien. The premise of humans exploring beyond the solar system, encountering technologically superior aliens, and dealing with the consequences of such an encounter all appealed to me. Nor can I complain about the pace of the book. Events moved along and there was enough action to keep me involved. On the other hand, the story always had something of a cold, impersonal feel for me. I found it impossible to really care about the principal characters, most of whom are computer "engrams" (i.e. programmed personalities based on real people who remained back on Earth). These engrams run the starships while "inhabiting" a virtual environment within the starship computers. A "dead" engram is just a deleted program when all is said and done, and I just couldn't get emotionally involved with that. Further, what is done to humanity and to Earth, both by aliens and by ourselves and our own technology, felt both far-fetched and improbably grim to me.

I read this book all the way through but, while it was interesting, I can't say that I liked it very much by the time I got to the end. Intellectually stimulating perhaps, but not emotionally satisfying. Some readers will like it a lot, I'm sure, but I had a very mixed reaction to it. At this point, I'm not sure if I will read the next book in this series or not. I can't give ECHOES OF EARTH a strong recommendation. Proceed at your own risk.

I've been reading science fiction for 25 years, and these days it's rare for me to encounter something that evokes the same wonder and excitement I felt the first time I read Ringworld or the Foundation Trilogy. Echoes of Earth is just such a novel.

This book held my attention from cover to cover, starting with the mystery of an alien race that bestows wonderous technological gifts to the first human interstellar explorers, and continuing with the frightening and awe-inspiring discovery by the explorers of just why Earth fell silent 100 years earlier. The conclusion of this book is the most surprising of all, but I will say nothing of that here, save that Williams and Dix take their storyline to an extreme that few authors would dare.

One of the most gratifying things about Echoes of Earth is that the authors didn't just crank out a cookie cutter plot - there were plenty of unexpected surprises to keep me on my toes, and to lend a sense of freshness to the story. What's more, the choice of a damaged engram who is struggling to remain stable as the primary character adds another layer of interest to this novel. (An engram is a computer simulation of a human mind, based on the memories and personality of an actual person.)

I can't really think of anything negative to say about this book. You should be forewarned, however, that when you get to the end you will immediately want to run out and purchase the next book in the series: Orphans of Earth. I know I did, because it's just that good!

I read the first trilogy by Sean Williams and Shane Dix and was quite impressed with it, although it felt a little raw - had a 'new writers' feel about it (although I know Sean Williams is quite an accomplished author - so maybe I should say a 'new writing partners' feel about it). Echoes of Earth though, is a solid bit of work in its own right! Unlike the Evergence trilogy, this book is thought provoking, and uses science to introduce mind-boggling ways fight. There is plenty of action in these books, but its more at the level of incredible cyberwars that we can only imagine in these books, but could (but hopefully not) happen in the future. Its an unbelievable vision.

The climax is quite shocking and sends your mind reeling as you work out the repercussions. Tragically, Williams and Dix go on to write another chapter/epilogue that it has all the atmosphere of a damn squib fizzling out. They should have just wound everything up at the climax and reworked that final chapter as the opening to the next novel in the series (I am reassured that having "Book 1" plastered over it means there is more to come in this series!). In my youth, I would get angry and finish the series there, but such wonders as "Red Dwarf" have taught me not to diss a series based on the ending of the first book. So I shall hang in there and support the boys from Oz. But, you'd like to think Williams and Dix had enough experience and exposure between them to have not had such a rubbishy weak link leading into the next book...

After surging to bestseller status with the impressive Convergence series, Sean Williams and Shane Dix return with a hard science fiction adventure that spans the stars. Peter Alander is a shadow of his former self in more ways than one, in a future where multiple copies of explorers have ventured out to see the universe, leaving their human bodies far behind on Earth. But, it is on the far edge of the universe that Alander and his shipmates discover something that Earth must hear about immediately. Or must it?

Williams and Dix never deliver anything less than heart-pounding action and excitement in there collaborations and ECHOES OF EARTH is no exception. It's a world we will barely recognise as our own, peopled with creatures that no longer resemble us in anything but the most superficial way. And that's the most stunning aspect of this new world of Williams and Dix's creation: the aliens encountered are scarely more inhuman than what awaits Alander on Earth.

No one in the genre is delivering more vivid, more mind-boggling far-space adventure than these two Australian authors. If you haven't caught onto their work yet, ECHOES OF EARTH is a perfect place to start. Don't blame me if you find yourself scrambling to find all their previous work, that's just the way it is with these guys...

Having thourouhly enjoyed the Evergence series, I was thrilled to see another book by Dix and Williams. This book (hopefully the first in a series) is NOT a clone of their previous series. There is a different kind of action here, yet no less gripping in my opinion. I was drawn in within the first chapter and the book continued to fill my head with questions and provoked some interesting thoughts on some age old concepts involving our species. This book had a kind of "Michael Crichton" feel to it, a group of scientists trying to unravel a mysterious something. I intentionally am not putting any story details in my review, as that will be for each person to discover on thier own. I will say that just like Evergence, I had trouble putting the book down each night and am anxiously awaiting the next book. Dix and Williams have a knack for creating lush environments in which their interesting characters can interact.
Keep em comin guys! You rock!

This book isn't the best that I have ever read, or the deepest novel, idea wise (but it wasn't exactly shallow either) but it kept my interest all the way through and was hard to put down. I read the last 1/3 in one go. Which is saying a lot comming from me because lately I have had a hard time finishing books - I have picked up a lot of novels but lost interest 2/3 of the way through and left them unfinished. But the last 1/3 of this novel was interesting enough to keep me reading - and wanting to read, and even *enjoying* the read.

Unfortunately - or not - this book is obviously part of a series (probably a trilogy)- as you will figure pretty quickly into the story (The "Orphans Series" as it is refered to in one part of the apendix - and that is the only place where it is acknowledged directly in the book that it *is* part of a series, but if you read it to the end it leaves many threads left hanging and many plot points unresolved) and you will have to wait for the next book, or books, in the series to find out how it all ends.

Still, like the previous "Evergence Series" (by the same authors) it is interesting and engaging enough to make you *want* to come back for more. And the universe that the novel takes place in is a place that is large enough in scope and wonder that, while you may not want to actually live there, it's a fun place to visit.

Not the greatest book every written, but better than most, and
a very good read. I recomend it.

This book is full of half realized fantastical ideas that it doesn't back up at all.
It pretty much loses its own thread and concentrates on some kind of existential crisis that the fake people in the book
should have learned to live with before being sent on a long space mission.
The technology is magical with no explanation at all.
And the ending while impressive, is depressing and meaningless, leaving one with vast sense of dissatisfaction.
This novel should have had an EDITOR who might have pushed the authors to work a little harder and back up their half formed concepts.
Why would I want to read a trilogy, if they are all as tedious as this one ?