Echoes of Earth [Paperback]

So once again, it's the future: 2165 or around about that. It appears that by 2050, Earth had become all peaceable and stuff and also monstrously prosperous, thanks to technology. So everyone became real keen on exploring space. 'Cept that it would be really expensive and not terribly feasible to send human crews blasting around for hundreds of years to reach our nearest neighbors. So engram crews were sent instead: super-complex software recreations of actual people, or bodiless clones, if you will. This meant that the ships just basically had to be flying computers with some nanofacturing capabilities to build stuff at the destination. Also the engrams could basically ride along in stand-by mode, more or less sleeping, so as to not, you know, flip out through the sheer boredom of the long voyage.

Well, at this here one distant destination, many light years away, and a hundred years after launch time, one engram does wig out over the basic disconnect over "my memories tell me I am Peter but really I know I am a computer program in a VR environment". So his crew dumps him in an android body on the planet's surface and tells him to just kind of putter about at the base camp there and stay out of their way. They get no transmissions from Earth, so obviously something happened during the trip and the home planet cannot or will not talk to them (although of course any real-time communications would be out of the question due to the years-long time lag).

A coupla years later, the engrams are just minding their business and building robo-facilities and exploring and stuff, when, within a day, a bunch of linked orbital towers get connected via space elevator to the surface. Who built these, and how and why, are mysteries. Pete the engram/android flies over to the base of one of the tower-things and gets a free ride up to the spindle attached above, way up in orbit. Then a pack of alien AIs go all, "I am for you, Peter" and tell him, yeah, some benevolent super-aliens just did a quick fly-by and built this whole complex installation with some of their Model T-level technology, 'cuz they're all hyper-advanced but they like to throw a few crumbs at the more primitive species they encounter, to help 'em bootstrap their way up. And oh, yeah, the alien AIs will only talk to and obey Peter and no one else in the crew.

So the novel goes from there. Who are these aliens? What do they want? Are they good? Are they bad? Should the engrammites use all of the kewl toys the aliens have given them? And what has become of Earth in the meantime?

This is a tale on yer epic Clarkean scale with a bit of Vernor Vinge thrown in. Huge revelations are...um...revealed. And action takes place on literally a stellar level. Lots of big ideas get thrown around. (The authors are a little too proud of their use of the revised Planckian measurement system, but it shows how seriously they take some of their scientific gimcrackery.)

It's pretty good and definitely bold. Zesty, with a big finish and a slightly nutty aftertaste. I enjoyed it, and my cat Mr. Hate gives it his highest recommendation of "I would sleep on top of that book".

I read this book all the way through but, while it was interesting, I can't say that I liked it very much by the time I got to the end. Intellectually stimulating perhaps, but not emotionally satisfying. Some readers will like it a lot, I'm sure, but I had a very mixed reaction to it. At this point, I'm not sure if I will read the next book in this series or not. I can't give ECHOES OF EARTH a strong recommendation. Proceed at your own risk.