Edges (Inverted Frontier)

Paperback, 404 pages

Published March 31, 2019 by Mythic Island Press LLC.

ISBN:: 978-1-937197-26-1

(2 reviews)

Deception Well is a world on the edge, home to an isolated remnant surviving at the farthest reach of human expansion. All across the frontier, other worlds have succumbed to the relentless attacks of robotic alien warships, while hundreds of light years away, the core of human civilization--those star systems closest to Earth, known as the Hallowed Vasties--have all fallen to ruins. Powerful telescopes can see only dust and debris where once there were orbital mega-structures so huge they eclipsed the light of their parent stars.

No one knows for sure what caused the Hallowed Vasties to fail, but a hardened adventurer named Urban intends to find out. He has the resources to do it. He commands a captive alien starship fully capable of facing the dangers that lie beyond Deception Well.

With a ship's company of explorers and scientists, Urban is embarking on a voyage of re-discovery. They will …

Deception Well is a world on the edge, home to an isolated remnant surviving at the farthest reach of human expansion. All across the frontier, other worlds have succumbed to the relentless attacks of robotic alien warships, while hundreds of light years away, the core of human civilization--those star systems closest to Earth, known as the Hallowed Vasties--have all fallen to ruins. Powerful telescopes can see only dust and debris where once there were orbital mega-structures so huge they eclipsed the light of their parent stars.

No one knows for sure what caused the Hallowed Vasties to fail, but a hardened adventurer named Urban intends to find out. He has the resources to do it. He commands a captive alien starship fully capable of facing the dangers that lie beyond Deception Well.

With a ship's company of explorers and scientists, Urban is embarking on a voyage of re-discovery. They will be the first in centuries to confront the hazards of an inverted frontier as they venture back along the path of human migration. Their goal: to unravel the mystery of the Hallowed Vasties and to discover what monstrous life might have grown up among the ruins.

1 edition

enne📚 reviewed Edges (Inverted Frontier) by Linda Nagata

3 stars

Edges is a science fiction space story about uploading and alien technology.

There's a lot of fun ideas here, like the captured alien spaceship that requires constant negotiation and consensus, or (similar to Children of Time) putting yourself to sleep for long periods of uninteresting time as needed, but ultimately this is a story a dictatorial spaceship captain, an invader, and the people caught between.

One thing I couldn't get past reading this was the horror of consciousness splitting. Sometimes people are instantiated into bodies and then it's "welp I'm done with this body now", but excuse me that new you was conscious and you just killed it? There's some nod to this, but mostly it's waved past in an unintentionally horrifying way.

Catship reviewed Edges (Inverted Frontier) by Linda Nagata

Ok that was cool

No rating

It's much more serious than my usual kind of scifi. Like, it's spanning centuries and it's kinda technical in its descriptions of... stuff. It's also a little more heteronormative than I'm used to. But it's still cool.

Some things that I enjoyed: - copying your consciousness as needed, creating diverging timelines of yourself, both virtual and physical, communicating between them and merging them back together - the ship is alive and it's angry - sometimes you just sleep for a few centuries and tell the computer to wake you if anything interesting happens

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