The Golden Age: An Epic SF Adventure (Hardcover)

1: I just got back from a semi-romantic dinner with my 24 year old ex...stunningly beautiful, tall, Mexican...an absolute angel. Anyway, all to say I needed a few drinks to help reconcile why she's my ex, so, technically, I'm drunk.

2: I've been agonizing over how to write a review about a trilogy so important to me, so life changing, that in all my determined creative ability, I've failed to find proper words for.

Allright then, now that I've set the contextual table for my mindset in writing this review...

Hmmm...three 400 something paged books, that's quite an investment for even the most voracious reader. Me, I almost abandoned this series in Shanghai China (where I brought it to serve as a semi-cerebral distraction from the dark melee that is Shanghai to a well-to-do 30 year old). Anyway, about 50 pages into this first book I almost dropped it. Although fascinated by the bigness of its scope (10,000 years into the future, insanely well-thought-through...it just wasn't hooking me right). I put it down for a couple of months, but found myself talking to friends about what I had read. For instance, I would share how (that far into the future) characters took the potential for miscommunication so seriously that it would take a page or so to issue a simple salutory greeting (of course! strange, but that's just right!) So, while it didn't grip me from the start, its unique style, complexity, and substance stayed with me. I decided to give it another chance.

I'm so thankful I did.

At around 80-100 pages I was consumed in this strange but believable world of the future, set so far ahead of any reasonable predictatory event horizon most mere mortal authors would attempt. John Wright pulls it off in a way that is sure to earn him a place at the table of some of the best sci-fi writers of all time. Delicious prose gives life to a story so well detailed, characters so solid and dynamic, it wouldn't surprise me if there exists whole books he wrote just to make sure there weren't inconsistencies.

Damnit, I'm getting off the subject. Here is the essence of what I'd like to communicate. Having waited until finishing this trilogy before writing this review I can say this:

The first book (The Golden Age) is fascinating, well-written, and rife with mind-numbing concepts detailing the wildly fantastic potential of humanity that far off in the future.

But that's not why you should read The Golden Age.

You see (and this is where I'm really going out on an assumptive limb) I believe the author constructed the entire series to make one life changing point; a point made in one paragraph of the second to last page of the trilogy...the most important advice I've ever read or heard in my life.

I've told this to friends, and in each instance tendered this warning (because I could see what they planned to do): "It won't make sense to you unless you read the books".

And I mean it.

Unfortunately, as rational beings we need basis to believe anything; important understandings require substantial basis. That's what this trilogy is about. Other than being enormously entertaining, it builds 1500 pages worth of basis in making a simple, elegant, and enormously important statement.

It's now 2 in the morning, I'm exhausted (but newly sober). I hope that this review stimulates sufficient interest to compel you to pick up this first book, read 80 pages, and see if you yourself aren't seduced. However, unlike most pleasures, this series will leave you more fulfilled, more inspired, more uplifted after finish than during.

Like many others have said the first 100 pages leave you confused yet eager to see where this is going.

It is probably not for everyone.

The relationships among the major characters is Truly some of the best writing ever. I cant wait for Mr WRights next book.

Opinion: Wow! It took me a while to figure out all the language in the book (there are many large, compound words full of meaning that I'm sure I missed alot of). Once I got the basic grasp of the structure of the societies involved, I was engrossed. This story has many facets, many of which I listed above in the summary. I seriously need to pick up the second book in this series because This book just ends. Not much is resolved, yet many things seemed to have been resolved. The resolutions bring up many more questions. The descriptions did get a little tedious at times, especially with all the strange vocabulary, but it didn't occur enough for me to lose interest. I feel that the universe is set up enough now and expect more action in the next 2 books. I'm not even really sure how many books this story will take. I really loved this book though. 4.5 out of 5

Recommendation: I would highly recommend this book to anyone who like sci-fi. I would not call it cyberpunk, but it does have a cyberish mentality to it.