Michael Barnes
In a far future where Earth exists but as a barely inhabitable abandoned husk and humanity lives in constructed artificial stations dominated by a corporate alliance known as MERIT (the initials of the surnames of the five constituent families) the reach of humanity is every expanding and yet impoverished all the time, their continued survival pegged to a rare mineral called relkaktite, first found on Venus and now mined everywhere, its presence in the artificial golden pathways that line everyone with added strength, knowledge and skills, the key, so it is said, to humanity’s future progress and success.
The Mercator family patriarch Acaelus is the archetypical controlling corporate tyrant/mafioso tolerating no failure or deviation in his orbit, including his gentle, geologist son Tarquin, whose frequent observation of the nature of this sixth cradle (the term for human sustaining planets) I was intrigued by and wish I knew more geology to know if it was through research or just sounded sciencey.
In this sci-fi world, humans have achieved a longer lifespan by “printing” their neural map into a new body when the old one dies. Reminiscent of Richard K. Morgan's of 'Altered Carbon'.
The book opens with exploding starships and the action from there never lets up. We meet one of our protagonists Naira Sharp who used to be a highly expert body guard called and Exemplar before she began to suspect that the Mercators were causing the planets to collapse.
Through in a mystery about TWO competing fungus, walking dead like missprints of people from these neural maps, Ais and space opera with cyberpunk corporate noir.
Consider two themes of this story
turning a blind eye to the ecological impacts of advancing technology. the danger of allowing a handful of individuals or families to control most wealth.
Can't imagine why this might resonate with readers
In a far future where Earth exists but as a barely inhabitable abandoned husk and humanity lives in constructed artificial stations dominated by a corporate alliance known as MERIT (the initials of the surnames of the five constituent families) the reach of humanity is every expanding and yet impoverished all the time, their continued survival pegged to a rare mineral called relkaktite, first found on Venus and now mined everywhere, its presence in the artificial golden pathways that line everyone with added strength, knowledge and skills, the key, so it is said, to humanity’s future progress and success.
The Mercator family patriarch Acaelus is the archetypical controlling corporate tyrant/mafioso tolerating no failure or deviation in his orbit, including his gentle, geologist son Tarquin, whose frequent observation of the nature of this sixth cradle (the term for human sustaining planets) I was intrigued by and wish I knew more geology to know if it was through research or just sounded sciencey.
In this sci-fi world, humans have achieved a longer lifespan by “printing” their neural map into a new body when the old one dies. Reminiscent of Richard K. Morgan's of 'Altered Carbon'.
The book opens with exploding starships and the action from there never lets up. We meet one of our protagonists Naira Sharp who used to be a highly expert body guard called and Exemplar before she began to suspect that the Mercators were causing the planets to collapse.
Through in a mystery about TWO competing fungus, walking dead like missprints of people from these neural maps, Ais and space opera with cyberpunk corporate noir.
Consider two themes of this story
turning a blind eye to the ecological impacts of advancing technology. the danger of allowing a handful of individuals or families to control most wealth.
Can't imagine why this might resonate with readers