Vast (Mass Market Paperback)

by Linda Nagata (Author) "Point zero: initiate. A sense kicked in..." (more)
Key Phrases: sensory tears, philosopher cells, transit bubble, Null Boundary, Alpha Cygni, Deception Well (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
The Vast curtain opens with four crew members on the vessel Null Boundary making their centuries-long journey towards the star system of Alpha Cygni. More refugees from a broken civilization than explorers, they seek the Chenzeme, murderers of the human race, whose 30-million-year-old warships prowl the near and far reaches of space, destroying all they encounter.

Linda Nagata is remarkably adept at introducing new concepts without disturbing the flow of the narrative. Vast molds human figures out of a clay of genetic, nano, and virtual technology, allowing their humanity to take primacy: "It came without warning, making no sound. Lot first sensed its presence as a flash of motion in the central tunnel. He looked around, to see a flood spiraling down on him, white water sluicing through an invisible pipe, a snake made of water. It swept into the chamber; it coiled around him, an arm's length away. The coils of the snake melted together, and he was encased in a glistening shell. Charismata of exhilaration rained against his sensory tears, a strange foreign sense of greeting. Tendrils reached out to him from the shell's shimmering white surface, a thousand slender white tendrils brushing him. Faint touches. Where they contacted his skin suit they retracted, but where they touched his bruised face they stayed. Familiarity flooded him, a warm sense of union that eased the black pressure of the cult [virus] forever burning under his skin. A voice whispered in his ear, produced by a trembling membrane on the end of a tendril. 'You know us?'"

Make sure you're in a comfortable position when you start reading: Linda Nagata is light years ahead of her contemporaries in writing heart-racing, hard-science SF. Once this story sinks its teeth into you, you won't hear the phone ringing or care that it's way past bedtime until the last page is turned. --Jhana Bach

Product Description
Aboard Null Boundary, a giant starship thousands of years old, four survivors of an ancient alien war are making a desperate journey: Lot, son of a fiery prophet and carrier of an insidious virus that spreads a cultlike religious mania among those it infects; Urban, Lot's boyhood friend from the city of Silk, and a man in search of challenge and adventure; Clemantine, cast adrift when her world was destroyed, and yearning for revenge; and Nikko, sometimes a living man, but always the ship's disembodied mind.

They are bound for unknown territory. Ahead of them loom vast, lightless clouds of dust and gas where stars are born, and where the alien Chenzeme are believed to live. The Chenzeme are an enigmatic race whose automated warships have ravaged the living worlds of the galaxy's Orion arm for millions of years. But why? Null Boundary's crew is driven to find out--though in their quest to discover the source of the Chenzeme, they must also explore the terrible truth of their own past, the meaning of revenge, and the price each one of them is willing to pay for survival.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Spectra; Later Printing edition (August 3, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553576305
• ISBN-13: 978-0553576306
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,748,896 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars not a hackneyed plot device in sight!, July 5, 2000

By	allison wyndham (japan (an australian)) - See all my reviews

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!

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Mixed Bag., January 2, 2000

By A Customer

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well worth the effort, November 29, 2000

By	CD Harris "Amuk" (Kentucky) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.