Customer Reviews

Vast

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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!

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.

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."

This book is close to perfect, although not for everybody. The prose is sparse, smart and literate, as well as being communicated in a number of styles ranging from truly obtuse alien lingo, to raygun space opera. The novel makes allusions to several human myths and paradoxes, some of which are stated by other reviewers. The thing that's great about this book is it's assumption that you, the reader, are bright enough to figure out what's going on. It drops you in very foreign territory and gets you thinking about the what ifs of science - basically it made me remember why I love science fiction when it's good. But if you prefer bad me-too cyberpunk it won't be your cup of tea. However, it isn't a slow read if you enjoy a good solid peice of fiction and it begs you to think about it even when you've put it down. It's subtlety has stayed with me as I think about it - the main complaint I've heard is, in many ways, the point of the book - that the characters are less real than the artifacts of their short existence, and that evolution most times is about divergence. It's the continuation of another book (second half repackaged by the publisher? - either way it worked out for the best), and if I had read that one first, I wouldn't have picked it up. Something special. Read it.

Tres bizarre, non? I gave this novel 3 stars because it's intent is good but the delivery does not convince. We are dropped into a universe thousands of years into the future where Heraclitus has won over Parmenides. Through technology, everything is mutable and multiplicity is rampant. The human race has split into separate species which bear little relation to us and hence it was hard for me find them compelling or at all interesting. Nagata's universe is like a hugh VR Matrix where physical laws are options not givens. The science borders on implausible. The story is set against a backdrop of an several million year old civil war between the shipbuilders and the cult virus creators. The former wishes to destroy the other outright, the other destroys by assimilation and transformation. But who the hell are these ancient aliens? What the hell is the cult? Why the war? The answers are so steaped in time that the Chenzeme may not have existed in the first place. The book carries the protagonists who were created in the first book "Deception Well," on a centuries old journey to discover the origin of the cult and the Chenzeme. We are left at the end of the book even more confused and disappointed than at the start. In between, the characters flow in and out of corporeality, transferring themselves into ghosts or downloading themselves into neural nets or accompanying others in their atria or duplicating themselves so that there are hundreds of copies of them lying around the galaxy. The future of the human species may be even more bizarre than the human-alien hybrids of "Vast" as we learn to create designer organisms and Nagata gives you a feeling of this strangeness. However it makes for an abstract and sterile read, I'm afraid. She is an excellent technician but somehow I feel she has not grasped what it is to be human in the first place. All the characters she creates are like symbols pointing to other symbols rather than people with subtlty and substance. It is really too bad for the conception of the books is brilliant whereas the execution is taudry.

At one point in this story someone's life is in danger. Usually this would be a major inconvenience, but at this particular moment it's a terrifying risk, because he "doesn't have a backup."

If that sentence makes sense to you, you can probably understand this book. If it doesn't, maybe you can't.

No, this is not an easy book. But if you can follow it, it will take you on a hair-raising and deeply thought-provoking journey across the stars.

The scale is -- mm-hm -- vast, and the characters are fascinating. (They are all various degrees removed from what would presently be considered human -- one has a space-hardened body, for example; one exists only in software.)

Nagata uses many concepts from the farthest edges of contemporary science. The resulting story is way, way out there, but it's still "hard" science fiction, meant to be more or less plausible. There's nothing like fantasy or magic in it.

Vast drops you without preparation into the far, far, far future. There's a lot to learn for a visitor from the 21st century (that's you!). You have to be a fast learner. It helps if you've kept up with recent developments in nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and astrophysics. And it helps if you ENJOY being put into an intellectual "sink or swim" kind of situation. As you may infer, I enjoy it tremendously --

-- with the result that by the end of this book, I don't think there's any other way to describe it, I was in love with the author. An extremely smart, perceptive, and independent woman had shared with me some small part of her soul. So I googled her. She's already married, darn it.

An excelent nano-tech book with many interesting ideas. I stayed up way too late reading it; I recomend it highly.

I could not really care about any of the characters in this novel as their motivations were so far removed from reality that I could not identify with them. The concept of ghosts managed to destroy any dramatic tension, as any time a character was in danger my reaction was "so what?" If that character were killed they would just generate another version of him or her, so the fact that he or she dies means nothing.

I liked what I read in the first 34 pages but realized that there was just too much background info assumed - then it occurred to me that perhaps it was a part of a series - and sure enough one of the earlier books is entitled DECEPTION WELL - so now I have to buy that, read it first, before I can continue with VAST. It may well be able to "stand alone" but for this reader it would have been nice to know before buying that VAST would make a lot more sense if one read the previous novels.

I love books like this, and thought I would love Vast (my first Nagata). But I had to put it down after about 25% of the way through. The characters were all so alien, that I couldn't relate to any of them. The "hard-science" was so futuristic, that it wasn't even plausible -- and no attempt to explain it. I can't recommend this book, but I will try other books by Nagata and hope this was just a fluke. :-)