Its a real pleasure to re-read the Orphans Trilogy from Sean Williams and Shane Dix. Book One is packed full of big ideas and cataclysmic events.

In 2050 the UN launches a thousand missions to explore interstellar space, the ship's staffed not with humans but engrams: software recordings of human personalities. A century later the engram of explorer Peter Allander is facing an existential crisis when aliens bestow unimaginable gifts on his mission - a library of knowledge and technological advances that promises to change humanity's destiny for ever. But when he returns to Earth in one of these gifts - the FTL 'hole' ship, he doesn't find the welcome he's expecting.

Allander struggles with the nature of who he is - apart from the human who recorded him - while facing a series of life-threatening dangers and witnessing events that would blow anyone's mind, let alone a software rendition of a person. Highly recommended.