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Amaranthe #11-13
Amaranthe IV: Machina
When man and machine are one and the same, death is no longer an inevitability. But in the darkest reaches of space, neither is life.
**Includes all three novels (Exin Ex Machina, Of A Darker Void & The Stars Like Gods) in the cyberpunk/space opera trilogy ASTERION NOIR** (the 4th trilogy in the Amaranthe universe)
700,000 years ago, the Asterions fled persecution for their pro-synthetic beliefs. In the safe harbor of a distant galaxy, they have evolved into a true biosynthetic race and built a thriving society upon the pillars of personal autonomy, mutual respect and boundless innovation.
Now that society is fracturing at the seams. Beneath lies built upon lies, the shocking truth as to why threatens the future of not merely the Asterions, but all life in the universe.
Cyberpunk and space opera collide in a thrilling new trilogy from the author of the epic Aurora Rhapsody space opera saga. Enter a world of technological wonders, exotic alien life, enthralling characters, captivating worlds—and a terrifying evil lurking in the void that will shatter it all.
*
**Asterion Noir is a new entry point for the AMARANTHE series--newcomers are welcome**
*
EXIN EX MACHINA (Asterion Noir Book 1)
When man and machine are one and the same, there are many crimes but only one sin: psyche-wipe. The secrets it has buried could lead to a civilization's salvation, or to its doom.
The Asterion Dominion is at peace with its neighbors and itself. Its citizens enjoy great freedoms and all the luxuries their biosynthetic minds can imagine, design and create. But beneath the idyllic veneer, something is going wrong. People are going wrong, driven to commit inexplicable crimes without motive or purpose. And once imprisoned for those crimes, they simply vanish.
Psyche-wiped and dumped in an alley 5 years ago, awakened into a culture where ancestral memories stretch back for millennia, Nika Tescarav's past is a blank canvas. But if whoever erased her did so in the hope of silencing her, they should have tried harder.
Someone must speak for the lost.
Someone must uncover how and why they became lost.
Someone must find the lost.
Nika is that someone.
** AMARANTHE IV: MACHINA WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED UNDER THE TITLE "ASTERION NOIR: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION" **
**Includes all three novels (Exin Ex Machina, Of A Darker Void & The Stars Like Gods) in the cyberpunk/space opera trilogy ASTERION NOIR** (the 4th trilogy in the Amaranthe universe)
700,000 years ago, the Asterions fled persecution for their pro-synthetic beliefs. In the safe harbor of a distant galaxy, they have evolved into a true biosynthetic race and built a thriving society upon the pillars of personal autonomy, mutual respect and boundless innovation.
Now that society is fracturing at the seams. Beneath lies built upon lies, the shocking truth as to why threatens the future of not merely the Asterions, but all life in the universe.
Cyberpunk and space opera collide in a thrilling new trilogy from the author of the epic Aurora Rhapsody space opera saga. Enter a world of technological wonders, exotic alien life, enthralling characters, captivating worlds—and a terrifying evil lurking in the void that will shatter it all.
*
**Asterion Noir is a new entry point for the AMARANTHE series--newcomers are welcome**
*
EXIN EX MACHINA (Asterion Noir Book 1)
When man and machine are one and the same, there are many crimes but only one sin: psyche-wipe. The secrets it has buried could lead to a civilization's salvation, or to its doom.
The Asterion Dominion is at peace with its neighbors and itself. Its citizens enjoy great freedoms and all the luxuries their biosynthetic minds can imagine, design and create. But beneath the idyllic veneer, something is going wrong. People are going wrong, driven to commit inexplicable crimes without motive or purpose. And once imprisoned for those crimes, they simply vanish.
Psyche-wiped and dumped in an alley 5 years ago, awakened into a culture where ancestral memories stretch back for millennia, Nika Tescarav's past is a blank canvas. But if whoever erased her did so in the hope of silencing her, they should have tried harder.
Someone must speak for the lost.
Someone must uncover how and why they became lost.
Someone must find the lost.
Nika is that someone.
** AMARANTHE IV: MACHINA WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED UNDER THE TITLE "ASTERION NOIR: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION" **
- GenresScience Fiction
ebook
Published June 27, 2023
103 people are currently reading
55 people want to read
About the author
G.S. Jennsen
52 books518 followersG. S. Jennsen is a speculative and science fiction author, as well as a futurist, geek, gamer, programmer and editor. She has become an internationally bestselling author since her first novel, Starshine, was published in March 2014. She has chosen to continue writing under an independent publishing model to ensure the integrity of her series and her ability to execute on the vision she’s had for it since its genesis.
While she has been a lawyer, a software engineer and an editor, she’s found the life of a full-time author preferable by several orders of magnitude.
When she isn’t writing, she’s gaming or working out or getting lost in the mountains that loom large outside the windows in her home. Or she’s dealing with a flooded basement, or standing in a line at Walmart reading the tabloid headlines and wondering who all of those people are. Or sitting on her back porch with a glass of wine, looking up at the stars, trying to figure out what could be up there.
While she has been a lawyer, a software engineer and an editor, she’s found the life of a full-time author preferable by several orders of magnitude.
When she isn’t writing, she’s gaming or working out or getting lost in the mountains that loom large outside the windows in her home. Or she’s dealing with a flooded basement, or standing in a line at Walmart reading the tabloid headlines and wondering who all of those people are. Or sitting on her back porch with a glass of wine, looking up at the stars, trying to figure out what could be up there.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 17, 2019
This trilogy by G. S. Jennsen is built on the premise that people with fused biological and artificial intelligence can create a superior society due to that kind of individual’s capacity for improvement. Improvement is rewarded as 21st c Earthlings reward it (with money and the adulation of others, to say nothing of personal contentment.) Novelist Jennsen invents Asterions to illustrate this premise.
At the beginning of the trilogy a strange metallic alien culture (the Rasu) has threatened annihilation of all Asterions, unless its leaders don’t continually send them more and more individuals for Rasu experimentation. The protagonists among the Asterions are primarily Nika, a former ambassador and advisor to Asterion leaders but now a rebel, and her sidekick Dashiel, an industrialist. Nika is a gorgeous 700,000 years old, and Dashiel is a later generation version of one of her original lovers.
The improvement of individual Asterions depends on their choices of goals and physical augmentations. They have ample time to improve themselves, since sickness seems to be eradicated and cells renewed instead of aging. Physical augmentations or upgrades do not appear to include any to the brain, but if an Asterion wants to become the best slicer (hacker), he buys a new ten-fingered arm, and a rebel such as Nika gets an implanted knife in her wrist. And so on.
The five leaders of the Asterions began as ‘ordinary’, but over the 700,000 years of their lives they have gained so much knowledge that they decided their biological brains were incapable of holding it all, and so they’ve rejected bodies in favor of pure artificial intelligence. They are so smart that, in the eight years since encountering the ‘undefeatable’ Rasu, they have done nothing except to devise ways of delivering more and more living Asterions to these aliens. (SPOILER ALERT: When the Asterion leadership is overthrown, it takes ordinary Asterions -- who are different from the leaders only in that they have biological bodies -- just a few days to come up with the solution to the Rasu problem. To support her own original premise for the book, Jennsen might have devised a biologically-based individualistic kind of solution, but sadly, it's all tech. As well, the solution needed too many people and concepts that weren't built in earlier in the trilogy. A good editor would have helped here. SPOILER ENDS.)
When endless time is available and examples of near-perfection (Nika) exist in a society that uses only certain kinds of physical augmentation to improve themselves, there is no obvious reason why everyone isn’t like Nika. I was bothered by this from the moment I understood Jennsen’s premise. Sadly, Jennsen ignores this problem, presumably assuming that her readers will be needy enough that they will unquestioningly enjoy discovering what it’s like to be better than everyone else, the way Nika is.
The original concept of this book demanded serious attention to world building. The author has done very little. Asterions do not act any differently from ordinary 21st c Earth humans. They drink to drown their sorrows; they celebrate by speechifying and drinking a lot, while devouring bags of chips and bowls of peanuts and sandwiches and potatoes; they buy designer pant suits to impress; they change their hairdo to suit their mood; they occasionally look at paintings and sculpture, or destroy them; they have events that are called cocktail parties or bigger ones where you can actually buy stuff from booths while drinking and dancing; they are said to prank one another and commit acts of revenge. Meanwhile, Jennsen doesn’t even bother to invent new slang for them, and so they use words like ‘hot’ and ‘cock’ the way your friends next-door might.
Sex is as good as Jennsen’s 21st century imagination can make it, which means no technique or appendage has been added or improved on in 700,000 years (despite all the intriguing possibilities). When an Asterion’s beloved enters the room their hearts still ‘stop’ and they ‘forget how to breathe’ whether they’ve been together as a couple only a few days or for hundreds of thousands of years. They hate, kiss, get jealous, throw recriminations, weep, and demand. No one has learned a thing about relationships despite their vast age. And although Nika is the superior Asterion while female, in this society men still throw women against walls and have to ‘earn the right to protect’ the women they love.
There are so many possibilities for potential newness in creating a people who have vast amounts of time as well as an incredible technology. There is no reason why they should feel like gadget- bearing Earthlings who live a very long time but somehow don’t ever say “What are we here for?” or “I’m bored.”
Worse, the author creates logical contradictions with the few non-human concepts she does invent. She tells us firmly that Asterions do not procreate. She means, they do not have children. They can improve themselves through augmentation, thus creating a new ‘generation’ of each individual to replace the old. Obviously their numbers should not be able to increase. However, we are told that they number in the millions, when they began with only a few thousand. How?
A character called Parc might provide the answer. He is one of the Rasu’s victims on a distant space station. Like most Asterions, he has made a backup of his psyche (a kind of computer program that preserves his memories, skill sets, and personality in case he is ‘psyche-wiped’ or suffers enough physical damage through accident or combat that his body dies.) The intention is to ‘install’ that backup psyche into a functioning but psyche-empty body. This means that Asterions must be capable of technologically creating new, functioning, living bodies that are empty of memories and skill sets. I accepted that. What I couldn't accept was how a backup program meant to preserve memories could magically change a generic body into Parc’s identical one. Yet this is what happens. Good old Parc is suddenly back with his buddies, while tortured Parc is still alive!
If Jennsen had worked this out in a way I could believe, it might explain how Asterions multiplied without children. Doubles, triples, even thousands of any one individual might exist. However, people identical to others still living are not individuals. If it takes thousands of any single Asterion to solve a problem, then individuality is not the key to Asterions' superiority as a species. And there goes Jennsen's premise.
The author needed a really good editor to point out how inadequately she had thought through her world. She needed an editor to tell her how unbelievable and even anachronistic her characters are. She needed an editor to point out there is no suspense in a book where the protagonist always succeeds. She needed an editor to show her how her paragraphing confuses and how not to frequently misuse prepositions (e.g. "execute on", "how good of a friend").
In traditional publishing, at least a reader has people other than the author to look to if a book doesn't work. But Jennsen likes self-publishing. She says it allows her to maintain the purity of her artistic vision. Unfortunately, any vision she has is as thin as the coating on a mirror, and very smudged indeed. G. S. Jennsen didn’t want anyone else's opinions, and so she has no one to blame but herself for the sad thing this trilogy turned out to be.
At the beginning of the trilogy a strange metallic alien culture (the Rasu) has threatened annihilation of all Asterions, unless its leaders don’t continually send them more and more individuals for Rasu experimentation. The protagonists among the Asterions are primarily Nika, a former ambassador and advisor to Asterion leaders but now a rebel, and her sidekick Dashiel, an industrialist. Nika is a gorgeous 700,000 years old, and Dashiel is a later generation version of one of her original lovers.
The improvement of individual Asterions depends on their choices of goals and physical augmentations. They have ample time to improve themselves, since sickness seems to be eradicated and cells renewed instead of aging. Physical augmentations or upgrades do not appear to include any to the brain, but if an Asterion wants to become the best slicer (hacker), he buys a new ten-fingered arm, and a rebel such as Nika gets an implanted knife in her wrist. And so on.
The five leaders of the Asterions began as ‘ordinary’, but over the 700,000 years of their lives they have gained so much knowledge that they decided their biological brains were incapable of holding it all, and so they’ve rejected bodies in favor of pure artificial intelligence. They are so smart that, in the eight years since encountering the ‘undefeatable’ Rasu, they have done nothing except to devise ways of delivering more and more living Asterions to these aliens. (SPOILER ALERT: When the Asterion leadership is overthrown, it takes ordinary Asterions -- who are different from the leaders only in that they have biological bodies -- just a few days to come up with the solution to the Rasu problem. To support her own original premise for the book, Jennsen might have devised a biologically-based individualistic kind of solution, but sadly, it's all tech. As well, the solution needed too many people and concepts that weren't built in earlier in the trilogy. A good editor would have helped here. SPOILER ENDS.)
When endless time is available and examples of near-perfection (Nika) exist in a society that uses only certain kinds of physical augmentation to improve themselves, there is no obvious reason why everyone isn’t like Nika. I was bothered by this from the moment I understood Jennsen’s premise. Sadly, Jennsen ignores this problem, presumably assuming that her readers will be needy enough that they will unquestioningly enjoy discovering what it’s like to be better than everyone else, the way Nika is.
The original concept of this book demanded serious attention to world building. The author has done very little. Asterions do not act any differently from ordinary 21st c Earth humans. They drink to drown their sorrows; they celebrate by speechifying and drinking a lot, while devouring bags of chips and bowls of peanuts and sandwiches and potatoes; they buy designer pant suits to impress; they change their hairdo to suit their mood; they occasionally look at paintings and sculpture, or destroy them; they have events that are called cocktail parties or bigger ones where you can actually buy stuff from booths while drinking and dancing; they are said to prank one another and commit acts of revenge. Meanwhile, Jennsen doesn’t even bother to invent new slang for them, and so they use words like ‘hot’ and ‘cock’ the way your friends next-door might.
Sex is as good as Jennsen’s 21st century imagination can make it, which means no technique or appendage has been added or improved on in 700,000 years (despite all the intriguing possibilities). When an Asterion’s beloved enters the room their hearts still ‘stop’ and they ‘forget how to breathe’ whether they’ve been together as a couple only a few days or for hundreds of thousands of years. They hate, kiss, get jealous, throw recriminations, weep, and demand. No one has learned a thing about relationships despite their vast age. And although Nika is the superior Asterion while female, in this society men still throw women against walls and have to ‘earn the right to protect’ the women they love.
There are so many possibilities for potential newness in creating a people who have vast amounts of time as well as an incredible technology. There is no reason why they should feel like gadget- bearing Earthlings who live a very long time but somehow don’t ever say “What are we here for?” or “I’m bored.”
Worse, the author creates logical contradictions with the few non-human concepts she does invent. She tells us firmly that Asterions do not procreate. She means, they do not have children. They can improve themselves through augmentation, thus creating a new ‘generation’ of each individual to replace the old. Obviously their numbers should not be able to increase. However, we are told that they number in the millions, when they began with only a few thousand. How?
A character called Parc might provide the answer. He is one of the Rasu’s victims on a distant space station. Like most Asterions, he has made a backup of his psyche (a kind of computer program that preserves his memories, skill sets, and personality in case he is ‘psyche-wiped’ or suffers enough physical damage through accident or combat that his body dies.) The intention is to ‘install’ that backup psyche into a functioning but psyche-empty body. This means that Asterions must be capable of technologically creating new, functioning, living bodies that are empty of memories and skill sets. I accepted that. What I couldn't accept was how a backup program meant to preserve memories could magically change a generic body into Parc’s identical one. Yet this is what happens. Good old Parc is suddenly back with his buddies, while tortured Parc is still alive!
If Jennsen had worked this out in a way I could believe, it might explain how Asterions multiplied without children. Doubles, triples, even thousands of any one individual might exist. However, people identical to others still living are not individuals. If it takes thousands of any single Asterion to solve a problem, then individuality is not the key to Asterions' superiority as a species. And there goes Jennsen's premise.
The author needed a really good editor to point out how inadequately she had thought through her world. She needed an editor to tell her how unbelievable and even anachronistic her characters are. She needed an editor to point out there is no suspense in a book where the protagonist always succeeds. She needed an editor to show her how her paragraphing confuses and how not to frequently misuse prepositions (e.g. "execute on", "how good of a friend").
In traditional publishing, at least a reader has people other than the author to look to if a book doesn't work. But Jennsen likes self-publishing. She says it allows her to maintain the purity of her artistic vision. Unfortunately, any vision she has is as thin as the coating on a mirror, and very smudged indeed. G. S. Jennsen didn’t want anyone else's opinions, and so she has no one to blame but herself for the sad thing this trilogy turned out to be.
August 14, 2020
Asterion Noir
This is a must read set. But do yourself the favor of starting at the beginning. I love this series!
This is a must read set. But do yourself the favor of starting at the beginning. I love this series!
November 29, 2020
“Asterion Noir,” books 11-13 of the Amaranthe saga, and book 4 of the Aurora collections, is an amazing space opera-love story-geekfest from the incomparable Ms. Jensen. It’s so smooth, so clever, so nearly always on point that maybe you’ll just read it slowly and enjoy the performance, even though there are a few nailbiters along the way--most of which come at you out of the blue.
The beginning is standard-issue: woman wakes up not knowing who she is and is rescued by a couple. But this doesn’t take long, and we quickly segué to a terrorist scene five years later, and it becomes clear that the terrorist group, NOIR, is going to be the focus of our attention. And that the woman we met at first, Nika, is now their leader.
Book 11 (book 10 is a collection of short stories) introduces us to the Asterions’ universe. Since I don’t want to give away the earlier events in the saga I’ll just say the Asterions are folks we met briefly at the end of book 9, and here we learn more about them. They are heavily equipped with artificial implants, similar to but not exactly like what Alex and Caleb, who headlined the first nine books became. Oh, and they’re immortal. They back up their memories on a regular basis.
Anyhow, Nika’s past has been erased. She, with the aid of some friends (one a friend with benefits) and then a boyfriend named Dashiell (they meet cute), discovers some details. And there’s this mysterious virus going around. The book ends with a quest to rescue someone, but it turns into something else entirely.
Jensen is good at that.
Book 12 begins with attempts to deal with this virus, despite resistance from the leaders of the society, the guides, who would prefer otherwise. Nika, along with Dashiell (reference deliberate, I suppose), who she discovers she knew before her memory was wiped, go on a journey to discover why people being convicted of petty crimes are going off to places unknown.
They find out.
Changes are made.
Book 13 deals with the dilemma of how to rebuild a society after a revolution, given only a limited time to do so. You will also learn how to capture a sentient starship. Best to say no more. I’ll just say the last two chapters are astonishing--Jensen juggles a host of characters, ideas, and action, and doesn’t stumble.
---
If you liked the Aurora books, you're almost guaranteed to like this collection, which is just a bit slower and a bit more thoughtful (at least till that frantic ending). Jensen wants you to examine the consequencces of the actions as much as the actions themselves (So, umm, can we like call this literature?). And then there’s her sense of place. You can so easily envision the conference rooms, factories, stores, to say nothing of Nika’s spacious apartment, her closet, and her clothes. The lady has fashion sense.
NOTIES AND ASIDES. R rated for sex scenes and four letter words. There are elements of the LGBTQ movement.
The beginning is standard-issue: woman wakes up not knowing who she is and is rescued by a couple. But this doesn’t take long, and we quickly segué to a terrorist scene five years later, and it becomes clear that the terrorist group, NOIR, is going to be the focus of our attention. And that the woman we met at first, Nika, is now their leader.
Book 11 (book 10 is a collection of short stories) introduces us to the Asterions’ universe. Since I don’t want to give away the earlier events in the saga I’ll just say the Asterions are folks we met briefly at the end of book 9, and here we learn more about them. They are heavily equipped with artificial implants, similar to but not exactly like what Alex and Caleb, who headlined the first nine books became. Oh, and they’re immortal. They back up their memories on a regular basis.
Anyhow, Nika’s past has been erased. She, with the aid of some friends (one a friend with benefits) and then a boyfriend named Dashiell (they meet cute), discovers some details. And there’s this mysterious virus going around. The book ends with a quest to rescue someone, but it turns into something else entirely.
Jensen is good at that.
Book 12 begins with attempts to deal with this virus, despite resistance from the leaders of the society, the guides, who would prefer otherwise. Nika, along with Dashiell (reference deliberate, I suppose), who she discovers she knew before her memory was wiped, go on a journey to discover why people being convicted of petty crimes are going off to places unknown.
They find out.
Changes are made.
Book 13 deals with the dilemma of how to rebuild a society after a revolution, given only a limited time to do so. You will also learn how to capture a sentient starship. Best to say no more. I’ll just say the last two chapters are astonishing--Jensen juggles a host of characters, ideas, and action, and doesn’t stumble.
---
If you liked the Aurora books, you're almost guaranteed to like this collection, which is just a bit slower and a bit more thoughtful (at least till that frantic ending). Jensen wants you to examine the consequencces of the actions as much as the actions themselves (So, umm, can we like call this literature?). And then there’s her sense of place. You can so easily envision the conference rooms, factories, stores, to say nothing of Nika’s spacious apartment, her closet, and her clothes. The lady has fashion sense.
NOTIES AND ASIDES. R rated for sex scenes and four letter words. There are elements of the LGBTQ movement.
August 24, 2020
An excellent trilogy of stories! I read these books back to back, so I am not sure how they stand as independent books. The characters were well developed and changed over the course of the story, the plot contained a series of increasingly difficult conundrums that was resolved in unexpected ways. All of this is as a story should be.
April 2, 2022
absolutely a must read
This is definitely one of the best series ever! The world, no, the universe building is outstanding and makes me almost feel a part of the story. If you are looking to be totally engrossed in a series you most definitely want to start with the first book!
This is definitely one of the best series ever! The world, no, the universe building is outstanding and makes me almost feel a part of the story. If you are looking to be totally engrossed in a series you most definitely want to start with the first book!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews