Kevin's Watch

I read this book last summer and bragged about it at Ahira's Hangar--the sequel, Superluminal, is coming out any day now and it's in my top 5, along with Runes and A Feast for Crows, of can't wait to reads...

Metaplanetary
by Tony Daniel
Eos, HarperCollins (USA & Canada), hc, April 2001

from the SciFiSite.com best book's of 2001 (rated #7):

David Soyka, in his review, describes this novel as "Heinlein meets Gibson and Stephenson, with a dash of Tom Robbins." The concept of Metaplanetary is that people throughout the solar system are in touch with each other via a web of bioengineered material that permits not only communication but also instantaneous replication of physical objects.

David says: "The grist is accessed by a human's convert portion -- a computing function hard wired into the personality -- permitting interaction in a virtuality with, among other things, purely artificial software constructs that enables not only relationships but procreation!

"And that's not even the weird part. What really makes Daniel's world-building unique is his conception of 'The Met' -- a system of spider web-like cables in space that connect the planets orbiting the Sun within the ring of the asteroid belt. These cables provide a means of transportation that bypasses the need for vehicular space travel. Don't laugh, because Daniel comes up with explanations rooted in quantum physics for this infrastructure that for all I know can actually be taken seriously

My Hangar blurb,

I'm about 200 pages in2 Metaplanetary by Tony Daniel and it's got me by the cojones! Knowing my unrequited love 4 Neverness and Req. for Homo Sapiens u understand my passion 4 Sci-Fis in the far-far future. So far Metaplanetary has not disappointed. Like Zindell there is alot of mathematical and quantum theory being knocked around here, but also like Zindell Daniel has the ability 2 break it down easily 4 the layman 2 understand. Sometimes Daniel's own personal quantum theories r a little difficult 2 see, but when u do-WOW-it's like entering a neat new little dimension.

Like Zindell's "fenestering" and Walter Jon William's "plasm" (in Metropolitian & City on Fire) Daniel's concept of "grist" may require u 2 suspend ur imagination 4 at least the first 100 pages. However, like Zindell and Williams, grist will grow (inside pun!) on u and later the thesis of Raphael Merced goes on 2 explain how it came about. Grist is basically tiny nanotech combined w/time fluxtuation and gravition encoding--one of the best ways of illustrating it is Star Trek the Next Generation:
remember when Capt. Picard asks 4 his Earl Grey tea from the "convenience" and it simply builds itelf? Well u get the idea....

Actually Daniel is borrowing from alot of great Sci-Fi masters: The "Met" is sort of a combination of Clarke's space ladders and Simmons' WorldWeb. U can also feel touches of Heinlien, Bradbury, Aldiss, Herbert and Brin here and there. In fact he makes fun references 2 some great Sci-Fi writters in interesting places. His originally and intelligence is what establishes him--Daniel is a very young man but he is outrageously intelligent. His characters aren't totally human but they r immediately engaging and in no way does he belittle the reader's intelligence. In fact, like Zindell, he seems so exicted about creating his completely new future that u can't help being caught up in that.

Intense virtual worlds and crossovers 2! I'd say more bout this but I'd really b spoiling...

I didn't know if I wanted 2 read this book or not, there is so much pap on the new Sci-Fi selves it's almost a crap-shoot nowadays, but after reading glowing recommendations from Gardner Dozois, Greg Bear, Lucious Shepard AND Roger Zelazny (who helped discover Daniel b4 his passing) I just had to. Daniel has also written: Earthling, Warpath and is now working on the sequel to Metaplanetary.

Sounds interesting. I'll have to pick this book up.

Here's is a tiny sample of his amazing and very engaging writing style:

To Claude, this all came as a revelation. The beauty of the system was directly tied to its physics and, for Claude, more importantly its algorithmic language. Music happened because the world was arranged in a certain way. It arose out of the world. And then Jensen played Mozart for the class, and Claude realized that, though music arose from the world, it was not necessarily of it. There was something else happening. Something better. Something above. Using the precision and order of nature, beauty could be produced, could come into being. If you began with a set of unifying principles that were all consistent with one another, you could work variations upon them that participated in that consistency and precision, but which were novel.

Cool. If Claude likes Mozart so much, wait till he hears Dvorack.