And it's even plausible!Īt times, Permanence may remind you of Ken Macleod's political SF, though Karl Schroeder is much less in your face (which I prefer). The power running through the cables made them glow in exactly the same way that tungsten had glowed in light bulbs.
Each filament was a fullerene cable that harvested electricity from Erythrion's magnetic field. " swarmed like insects around incandescent filaments hundreds of kilometers in length. But the real power of Permanence is the good old sense-of-wonder tech stuff: I like bildungsromans, and this is a good one. The framework of the novel is Rue's growth from scared kid to respected starship captain. Rue must take physical control of the ghost ship to make good her claim, but Powerful Forces want the ship for themselves. Her claim is denied - her 'comet' is really a spaceship - but then reinstated: it's not a human spaceship, and it doesn't answer calls, though the drive is still working. En route to Erythrion, Rue discovers, and files a claim on, a new comet. Meadow-Rue Rosebud Cassells lit out from Allemagne station when her bullying brother got to be too much. the great, grasping Colossus of the South? (The halo worlds are cold, too.) could this be socially-conscious Canada vs. It gets worse - the lit worlds are joining the new Earth-based Rights Economy, an aggressively-centralized property-rights setup that forbids any non-commercial transactions. FTL travel is much cheaper than the sub-light speed cyclers, so the halo worlds' economies, and the Cycler Compact, are near collapse. It's a noble and admirable organization, which has been seriously disrupted by the recent discovery of FTL travel - which, it turns out, will only work near a full-size star. Permanence is a quasi-religious order set up to support the great starships, and to preserve human civilization for the indefinitely long future. Ultra-light shuttles transfer passengers, crew and cargo at each port. The cyclers never stop, as the energy cost to boost them to relativistic speeds is, well, astronomical. All the colonies were linked by big, NAFAL starships, each traveling a fixed circuit of worlds - the cyclers. Humanity has settled dozens of extrasolar planets - the so-called "lit worlds" - and thousands of brown-dwarf colonies - the halo worlds. So opens Permanence, set in the 25th century. "The discovery that made interstellar travel possible was made in 1997 but at the time no one recognized its significance." It is a story of hope and danger, of a strange and compelling religion, Permanence, unique to this star-faring age, and of the re-birth of life and belief in a place at the edge of forever. This is the story of Rue's quest to visit and claim this ship and its treasures, set against a background of warring empires, strange alien artifacts, and fantastic science. Her discovery unleashes a fury of action, greed, and interstellar intrigue as many factions attempt to take advantage of the last great opportunity to revitalize - and perhaps control - the Compact. It is not the valuable comet she hoped for but something even more wonderful, an abandoned Cycler starship. Fleeing in a shuttle spacecraft from the sparsely populated and austere comet-mining habitat she has lived in her whole life, she spots a distant, approaching object, and stakes a legal claim to it. Young Rue Cassels of the Cycler Compact - a civilization based around remote brown dwarf stars - is running from her bullying brother, who has threatened to sell her into slavery.
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