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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A marvellous new voice in science fiction, January 14, 2001
The planet Ventus is a marvel of the terraformer's art. Rather than shoving around great loads of soil, gasses and liquids to make the world hospitable, Ventus' designers deployed a mere 70 kilos of intelligent nanotechnology. When the nanos landed, they used the world's fabric to copy themselves, absorbing the world's foundations as a sponge absorbs a bucketful of water, until the very planet was intelligent -- or rather, intelligences, a collection of autonomous gods and demigods and sprites and spirits, collectively called the Winds. Ventus sings. The ocean sings, "I am an ocean," and the waves sing, "I am a wave." The Winds sing their songs as they negotiate among themselves for the preparation of the world for the human masters to come. The clouds negotiate with the crops to provide water, the earthmovers negotiate with the sod over mineral allocation. Ventus is a Garden, a jewel of a world in a universe populated with innumerable humans and post-humans, and machine-human intelligences that embody as entire planets. Ventus is a garden, fallen. A thousand years after the terraforming project, the Winds have forgotten their human masters. Now the Winds barely tolerate the fallen inhabitants of the garden world, capriciously manifesting as avenging angels that smash overly technological artifacts and their makers; manifesting as sinister morphs that maintain ecological balance by tearing bears apart to make gophers; manifesting as the attenuated, magnetic celestials whose Heaven hooks crush masonry and rend bone as they seek to expunge infectious humanity. Jordan Mason, the boy-hero of the story, has been unwittingly implanted with off-world technology that turns him into a spy for Armiger, the avatar of the fallen God/world 3340. It's this very technology that makes him a target of the ruling machines, who come to perceive him a foreign technology that must be eliminated by the world's all-powerful immune system. Aided by the bounty-hunters Caladria May and Axel Chan, Jordan learns to control his technology and finds that the world itself is alive, shouting and singing in a billion variegated voices. Gradually, the boy comes to communicate with the planet itself, and to discover the internecine battles that have turned Ventus from Heaven to Hell. Schroeder's a voracious autodidact, and he weaves his multifarious backgrounds into the storyline, burying clues to Ventus's mysteries in avant-garde linguistics, in pervasive computing theory, in cryptography, and in the theology of his apostate Mennonite forefathers. The book is as epic in scope as The Lord of the Rings, but more nuanced; it's as technologically daring as Snow Crash, but better controlled, with a narrative that makes its many pages fly past. Schroeder's created a startling, thought-provoking marvel of a book, a voice to equal any of the new guard that the Commonwealth has materialized of late: Scotsmen Ken MacLeod and Iain Banks and Aussie Greg Egan have a new contemporary.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well plotted and rich in ideas, November 4, 2003
This review is from: Ventus (Mass Market Paperback)
I almost didn't read Ventus because I was disappointed in my first Schroeder novel, Permanence. I'm glad I gave it a try. Ventus suffers from some of the same problems present in Permanence: Schroeder's writing style is undeveloped, as are his characters. Indeed, he suffers from the classic characterization flaw of telling rather than showing (we basically have to take the narrator's word for it that Calandria May is unhappy with life, for example). Nevertheless, Ventus is overall a success. Schroeder keeps the plot moving and deftly handles the large cast of characters. The real centerpiece here is the planet, Ventus, and as we slowly learn more about its history and purpose, it becomes the most interesting character in the book. Although Schroeder doesn't develop them as far as he might, his ideas concerning the uses of nanotechnology, the nature of humanity and sentience, and far-future lifestyles and ethics are original and thought-provoking. Ventus is good SF.
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31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Possibly the SF book of the year, December 26, 2000
Ventus could be heaven--every drop of water, grain of sand, flake of snow is created and shaped by the nanotechnology that has teraformed the planet and made it earthlike. Yet the self-replicating and fractally self-aware nanos that make up this world view humans with suspicion and bare tolerance. They may have been created to serve humans, but they have left this behind them. Into this world comes Armiger, once a part of a God (a self-programmed artificial intelligence with superhuman powers and knowledge). If he can subvert the nanotechnology to his own ends, Ventus can become a power base stronger than anything known in the Universe. Against Armiger stand a pair of off-planet near-humans who defeated the God he served before, and Jordon Mason, a local implanted with a portion of Armiger now turned to be a tool against him. All of their off-world powers offer little help, though, in a world where anything external is treated as a disease and eliminated. Karl Schroeder makes this intriguing concept a powerful reality. Both characters and philosophical arguments are fully developed and convincing. The growth of Jordon, as he discovers that easy answers don't answer, the humanization of Armiger against his will, and the parallel changes in Calandria May (the off-worlder who seeks Armiger's destruction) are all sympathetic and believable. Ventus is the best SF novel I've read this year.
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