One is the creation of a person to solve a particular problem, an act regarded as unethical and dangerous by most of the crew, and one with unintended consequences throughout the story. I’ll just note some concepts included in the story. It’s tough to go much further without getting into spoilers. In this third book, the crew has reached the first of the core systems, Tanjiri, a solar system filled with the ruins of the earlier megastructures, but with what appear to be three artificial worlds in the inner solar system, a planet and its moon, both with apparently healthy ecosystems, and an artificial habitat city of some kind. The first two books in the series chronicle the journey to the edge of the core systems, the group’s encounter with a powerful superhuman entity named Lezuri, and the artificial world from Nagata’s earlier novel, Memory. There is a large cast of characters, but the central ones remain Urban and Clementine, two compelling characters from Nagata’s earlier Nanotech Succession series. The series is a about of group of people from an insulated colony who set out to travel back to the central systems and find out what happened, and to get an idea of how many humans, if any, remain.

(These warships and their origin are the focus of Nagata’s earlier novel: Vast.) By the start of the Inverted Frontier series, it’s not clear how much of humanity is actually left. A fleet of automated alien warships lay waste to the outer colonies. But several centuries later, these structures, referred to as the “Hallowed Vastries”, disappear, apparently due to catastrophic events.īut humanity beyond the core systems has its own struggles.

Although it’s a dangerous universe with plagues, wars, alien berserkers, malevolent god-like entities, and other hazards that prevent most people from living indefinitely.Īs humanity spreads throughout the local region of the galaxy, they watch from a distance as the oldest core systems erect vast megastructures called “cordons”, something like Dyson spheres, which hide their stars from the rest of the galaxy. The lack of FTL in this universe is made up for by humanity having mastered nanotechnology, enabling mind uploading and copying, and the construction of new bodies on demand. Unlike typical space opera, there is no faster than light travel, so no galactic empires as such. This is far future space opera, but with hard(ish) science fiction bent. The latest installment of Linda Nagata’s Inverted Frontier series, Needle, dropped last week, so of course I had to immediately move it to the top of the reading list.

Linda nagata memory