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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
not a hackneyed plot device in sight!,
This review is from: Vast (Mass Market Paperback)
I sought out this title after an annoying run of 2-dimensional, flat science fiction. You know the type - guy must solve riddle, shag the chick and win fame in his own life-time whilst eluding the bad guys! And all in teenage nerd prose. This can be fun if it's well-written, but very boring otherwise.'Vast' is not one of those books. Read 'Vast' if you are searching for some characters with a bit of meat on them and you don't mind a bit of vertigo. The setting is far in the future, the human race is all but extinct. The reader travels on the Null Boundary, a ship whose captain and passengers are seeking answers about the Chenzeme, a long-extinct race whose automated weapons still search space for intelligent life in order to wipe it out. Each character has brought along their personal demons, which the reader glimpses in the confinement aboard Null Boundary. In contrast to the yawning vacuum the ship travels through, this setting is enough to make both claustrophobes and agorophobes squirm. Ms Nagata does not patronise the reader by keeping the plot simple, nor are the motives of the characters clear. Her books "The Bohr Maker" and "Deception Well" are well worth reading in advance as they set the scene for Vast, though this book stands alone in its story. If you want something original, imaginative and substantial, then 'Vast' is well worth the read. I'd recommend this book for those who liked Peter Hamilton's imagination, but found his male characters irritating. Also worth checking out if you're a fan of Iain Banks' science fiction. Of course - I loved it!
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well worth the effort,
By
This review is from: Vast (Mass Market Paperback)
I lumbered through Deception Well in order to read this book. I didn't really enjoy that, to be honest (see my review of that book for more). But this one was worth the trouble.I needed to have the background from the previous book for this one to make any sense, but, once I had it, this one was a real gem. Nagata is among the more imaginative and detail-driven authors now publishing (in this or any genre). Sometimes, yes, she gets off the track of keeping the humanity of her characters the central principle (and their humanity is very much at issue) and she still tends to assume too much. But my biggest complaint with Deception Well has been more than adequately corrected here: she doesn't just tell us that a character feels or thinks a certain way and then assert that this makes sense without any support - she genuinely shows it and makes the reader see it. This is not a simple book. It is dense and it requires far more work to read and understand than 99% of the pulp on the shelves. As such, it was a real treat, and well worth the time and trouble required to get the most out of it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vastly creative,
By tertius3 (MI United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Vast (Mass Market Paperback)
Although nothing on the Bantam pb hints at it, this is a sequel to Deception Well I should have read first (and possibly the Bohr Maker and Tech Heaven, too, for the origins of the technology?). The characters and desperate situation are already fully formed as this escape-by-sentient-spaceship adventure begins, but you have clues and time to reconstruct enough of their history and motivation during the slow chase that begins the story (stretching over years, you'll wish you could enter cold sleep, too). The story is simple: 5 humans of future aspect, perhaps the only ones left, confined to their ship on a fixed trajectory to the enemy's homeland. That said, Nagata presents an amazingly original, ingenious, and convincingly detailed universe. Every so often a stunning revelation really twisted my perspective on the story in astonishing directions. The pursuing Chenzeme are as alien a thing as I've ever read in SF, convincingly different, chemically adaptable, implacable, and ageless machines, or perhaps bio-machines just pursuing sexual congress! The story is full of concentrated invention, a whole new realm of polymentalist humans, versions of self-cloning aptly termed "ghosting," planet creation, and more. What is unsettling about Nagata's talent is how, just as I got my mind around one thrilling new alien concept, it morphs into something further, or still another entirely new idea appears. While the human interactions don't go much beyond "the eternal triangle" as new individuals are created, the intellectual fascination is what kept me reading through the slow parts, to a more exciting if abrupt end as they break out of their confining "core."
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