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Permanence
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. 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. It is not the valuable comet she hoped for but something even more wonderful, an abandoned Cycler starship.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
480 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published May 1, 2002
37 people are currently reading
1016 people want to read
About the author
Karl Schroeder
95 books383 followersKarl Schroeder is an award-winning Canadian science fiction author. His novels present far-future speculations on topics such as nanotechnology, terraforming, augmented reality and interstellar travel, and have a deeply philosophical streak. One of his concepts, known as thalience, has gained some currency in the artificial intelligence and computer networking communities.
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September 17, 2022
"The discovery that made interstellar travel possible was made in 1997; but at the time no one recognized its significance..."
So opens Permanence, set in the 25th century. Humanity has settled dozens of extrasolar planets -- the so-called "lit worlds" -- and thousands of brown-dwarf colonies -- the halo worlds. All the colonies were linked by big, NAFAL starships, each traveling a fixed circuit of worlds -- the cyclers. The cyclers never stop, as the energy cost to boost them to relativistic speeds is, well, astronomical. Ultra-light shuttles transfer passengers, crew and cargo at each port.
Permanence is a quasi-religious order set up to support the great starships, and to preserve human civilization for the indefinitely long future. 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. FTL travel is much cheaper than the sub-light speed cyclers, so the halo worlds' economies, and the Cycler Compact, are near collapse. 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. Hmm... could this be socially-conscious Canada vs. the great, grasping Colossus of the South? (The halo worlds are cold, too.)
Meadow-Rue Rosebud Cassells lit out from Allemagne station when her bullying brother got to be too much. En route to Erythrion, Rue discovers, and files a claim on, a new comet. 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. Rue must take physical control of the ghost ship to make good her claim, but Powerful Forces want the ship for themselves...
The framework of the novel is Rue's growth from scared kid to respected starship captain. I like bildungsromans, and this is a good one. But the real power of Permanence is the good old sense-of-wonder tech stuff:
"[The colonies] swarmed like insects around incandescent filaments hundreds of kilometers in length. Each filament was a fullerene cable that harvested electricity from Erythrion's magnetic field... The power running through the cables made them glow in exactly the same way that tungsten had glowed in light bulbs... on twentieth-century Earth."
I love this stuff. And it's even plausible!
At times, Permanence may remind you of Ken Macleod's political SF, though Karl Schroeder is much less in your face (which I prefer). You'll see nods to Pohl's Gateway, Norton's Forerunners, Brin's and Pellegrino's hostile-universe Fermi-paradox ideas... Schroeder's still looking for a distinctive voice, which is pretty standard for a writer's early books, and anyway hesteals borrows from the best...
Schroeder's very good at delivering the short, sharp shock: Rue's poor, then she's rich! Oops, bad claim, poor again. Wait, she's rich after all! This 'Perils of Pauline' plot structure works pretty well for most of the book, but was wearing thin towards the end. Again, these are sophomore-book teething problems, easily forgivable within the terrific story (and backstory!) that Schroeder's got to tell. Which is: classic, wide-screen space-opera with a sharp hard-sf edge -- my favorite kind of SF! Folks, this is the good hard stuff, which is never in oversupply. So if you haven't yet tried Schroeder's brand of thinking-being's hard-sf adventure stories, Permanence is an excellent place to start. Then you can go back and pick up on last year's Ventus, which might even be better. They're both terrific books. Happy reading!
My 2002 review: https://www.sfsite.com/06a/pm129.htm
Russ Allbery's enthusiastic review: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/...
2022 reread: the book holds up well to reread, although some of the political stuff not so much. But the speculative science is still first rate. Recommended reading.
So opens Permanence, set in the 25th century. Humanity has settled dozens of extrasolar planets -- the so-called "lit worlds" -- and thousands of brown-dwarf colonies -- the halo worlds. All the colonies were linked by big, NAFAL starships, each traveling a fixed circuit of worlds -- the cyclers. The cyclers never stop, as the energy cost to boost them to relativistic speeds is, well, astronomical. Ultra-light shuttles transfer passengers, crew and cargo at each port.
Permanence is a quasi-religious order set up to support the great starships, and to preserve human civilization for the indefinitely long future. 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. FTL travel is much cheaper than the sub-light speed cyclers, so the halo worlds' economies, and the Cycler Compact, are near collapse. 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. Hmm... could this be socially-conscious Canada vs. the great, grasping Colossus of the South? (The halo worlds are cold, too.)
Meadow-Rue Rosebud Cassells lit out from Allemagne station when her bullying brother got to be too much. En route to Erythrion, Rue discovers, and files a claim on, a new comet. 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. Rue must take physical control of the ghost ship to make good her claim, but Powerful Forces want the ship for themselves...
The framework of the novel is Rue's growth from scared kid to respected starship captain. I like bildungsromans, and this is a good one. But the real power of Permanence is the good old sense-of-wonder tech stuff:
"[The colonies] swarmed like insects around incandescent filaments hundreds of kilometers in length. Each filament was a fullerene cable that harvested electricity from Erythrion's magnetic field... The power running through the cables made them glow in exactly the same way that tungsten had glowed in light bulbs... on twentieth-century Earth."
I love this stuff. And it's even plausible!
At times, Permanence may remind you of Ken Macleod's political SF, though Karl Schroeder is much less in your face (which I prefer). You'll see nods to Pohl's Gateway, Norton's Forerunners, Brin's and Pellegrino's hostile-universe Fermi-paradox ideas... Schroeder's still looking for a distinctive voice, which is pretty standard for a writer's early books, and anyway he
Schroeder's very good at delivering the short, sharp shock: Rue's poor, then she's rich! Oops, bad claim, poor again. Wait, she's rich after all! This 'Perils of Pauline' plot structure works pretty well for most of the book, but was wearing thin towards the end. Again, these are sophomore-book teething problems, easily forgivable within the terrific story (and backstory!) that Schroeder's got to tell. Which is: classic, wide-screen space-opera with a sharp hard-sf edge -- my favorite kind of SF! Folks, this is the good hard stuff, which is never in oversupply. So if you haven't yet tried Schroeder's brand of thinking-being's hard-sf adventure stories, Permanence is an excellent place to start. Then you can go back and pick up on last year's Ventus, which might even be better. They're both terrific books. Happy reading!
My 2002 review: https://www.sfsite.com/06a/pm129.htm
Russ Allbery's enthusiastic review: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/...
2022 reread: the book holds up well to reread, although some of the political stuff not so much. But the speculative science is still first rate. Recommended reading.
September 1, 2022
The first thing I should say about Permanence is that it is a very deceptive book. It didn’t take me as quick as I had expected to finish it; not even close.
Permanence is the attempt to create a human culture that can survive indefinitely here in deep interstellar colonies.
In some ways this book reminded me of The Eternity Artifact. Permanence deals with an artifact, but only insofar as the artifact acts as a catalyst for a different story, involving politics, economics, theology, philosophy, ideology and what basically boils down to an existential crisis for humankind (but as seen through the eyes of certain individuals).
”Their light is fading; all light will fade, they tell me, and no one can hold back the darkness of individual and species extinction for long.”
It is one of those Hard Science Fiction / Space Opera hybrids and elsewhere it is compared (and possibly rightly so) with the works of Vernor Vinge. It is not quite like any of the other SF books I have been reading recently, and the author does seem to have a fairly unique voice, given the aspects of science and future that he focuses on. According to Mr Schroeder’s Wikipedia entry he is a professional Futurist, something that no doubt plays a role in his envisioning of how interstellar expansion might pan out.
For a moment she could vividly picture the place—the dead roads and buildings black under the stars, a weightless cityscape where bodies frozen for three billion years still drifted through the rooms like ghosts, or embodiments of despair.
There are some really Intriguing xeno-archeological and xeno-philosophical (for lack of better terms) mysteries at the heart of everything happening here. And, given all the ideas, themes and critiques contained in Permanence, you should pay attention so as not to miss anything.
There is some action, some intrigue, some adventure, some scientific exploration, some wonder…. All in a well rounded Science Fiction romp.
In the end I found it a challenging but rewarding read.
Permanence is the attempt to create a human culture that can survive indefinitely here in deep interstellar colonies.
In some ways this book reminded me of The Eternity Artifact. Permanence deals with an artifact, but only insofar as the artifact acts as a catalyst for a different story, involving politics, economics, theology, philosophy, ideology and what basically boils down to an existential crisis for humankind (but as seen through the eyes of certain individuals).
”Their light is fading; all light will fade, they tell me, and no one can hold back the darkness of individual and species extinction for long.”
It is one of those Hard Science Fiction / Space Opera hybrids and elsewhere it is compared (and possibly rightly so) with the works of Vernor Vinge. It is not quite like any of the other SF books I have been reading recently, and the author does seem to have a fairly unique voice, given the aspects of science and future that he focuses on. According to Mr Schroeder’s Wikipedia entry he is a professional Futurist, something that no doubt plays a role in his envisioning of how interstellar expansion might pan out.
For a moment she could vividly picture the place—the dead roads and buildings black under the stars, a weightless cityscape where bodies frozen for three billion years still drifted through the rooms like ghosts, or embodiments of despair.
There are some really Intriguing xeno-archeological and xeno-philosophical (for lack of better terms) mysteries at the heart of everything happening here. And, given all the ideas, themes and critiques contained in Permanence, you should pay attention so as not to miss anything.
There is some action, some intrigue, some adventure, some scientific exploration, some wonder…. All in a well rounded Science Fiction romp.
In the end I found it a challenging but rewarding read.
May 3, 2011
I'm sorry to say, I couldn't bring myself to finish this one. The ideas behind the novel are somewhat interesting; not fascinating, just enough to make you go 'Hmm.' Once you marvel at the civilization Schroeder built around brown dwarfs, all you're left with is a poor plot that is childish and amateur.
There's something annoyingly artificial about the way the characters are written. They go along with mad ideas just because the plot requires a crew for the protagonist's quest. The events that litter the book seem dangerous on the surface, but feel like book-padding, and are never really engaging.
One example is Max, the protagonist's cousin. He somehow shows up at the start of the novel, and conveniently turns out to be very rich, which conveniently solves the heroine's problems. Not only is he rich, but he also conveniently won the lottery, so there's nothing to explain about it. Such events occur at a maddening frequency, painfully linking what certainly sounded like good plot points in a synopsis.
I hate to downright bash a novel, but this one should have been reworked and re-edited before it hit the shelves.
There's something annoyingly artificial about the way the characters are written. They go along with mad ideas just because the plot requires a crew for the protagonist's quest. The events that litter the book seem dangerous on the surface, but feel like book-padding, and are never really engaging.
One example is Max, the protagonist's cousin. He somehow shows up at the start of the novel, and conveniently turns out to be very rich, which conveniently solves the heroine's problems. Not only is he rich, but he also conveniently won the lottery, so there's nothing to explain about it. Such events occur at a maddening frequency, painfully linking what certainly sounded like good plot points in a synopsis.
I hate to downright bash a novel, but this one should have been reworked and re-edited before it hit the shelves.
October 31, 2009
There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of this book. Fast paced adventure has subtext about our economy and microtransations that has completely changed the way I look the world around me -- I seriously cannot use an ATM machine without getting angry after reading this novel. It reads like SF, but it is a thorough-going critique of capitalism gone wrong. And the universe he is building in this novel, along with his other works, really makes one think about implications of social networking software...
March 17, 2022
This is a good adventure story with plenty of imaginative science fiction and a fair share of action scenes. The universe is well formed and interesting even though I didn't quite grasp it all. The plot moves forward in little leaps at times which works well, it doesn't follow every damn minute of every journey. A couple of times early on the narrative switched perspective to follow another group which was also fine, but there was no real introduction for those characters.
The main characters are preeetty good, although I wouldn't call any of them loveable. You certainly root for them to succeed and I really wanted to like the main character, she is about 17 when the story starts and she has escaped the toxic environment of her family life but I just found her to be somewhat inconsistent. The author has her feeling her way through her new found independence which is appropriate, but sometimes frustrating. Sometimes she would make a decision based on whether a person was cute. What? Yeah, I know. And it was so out of place compared with the rest of this reasonably well written book.
The setup is a bit silly but is also a fun series of events. Meadow Rue Cassels, or just Rue as she prefers, bails out of the station where she lived and worked to escape her bully of a brother, Jentry. She shoots her brother in the face then peels out in the shuttle that they had inherited from their late mother. Oh, don't worry. Jentry isn't dead.
It just keeps piling on. Rue has no idea where she's going. The ship's AI informs her that she can make it to another station safely, but when she learns the cost of visiting the station she realises it is well beyond her budget. While she is ruminating over her lack of options the AI announces that a massive comet is registering on sensors. You bloody beauty! Rue is going to be rich and quickly stakes a claim which is legally recognised only hours later. Oh, damn. That's not actually a comet.
When Rue arrives at Treya, the "nearby" planet which had recognised her claim she learns that further investigation revealed her discovery to be another ship rather than the comet which she had hoped to cash in on. She had become something of an overnight celebrity and switched off comms to ignore the inundation of messages from people trying to get their fingers in her pie, so she was completely surprised by the news which she received on arrival. Ah, but don't give up. There is still hope.
Once the news had been updated, the family who she expected to meet on her arrival at Treya deserted her and she arrives to find only a single cousin, Maximilian, is waiting to greet her. It takes a bit of to-and-fro-ing for Rue to learn to trust Max, but he lifts her spirits when he; 1 - Wants to help her claim the vessel and 2 - Turns out to be rich enough to do so. They set up the shuttle for the trip to capture and redirect the wayward "Cycler", organise a slapdash crew and next thing you know Rue is the captain of this crazy plan.
The competition is on though, because other interested parties want to claim the Cycler vessel. Unlike claiming a comet which is done by simply reporting the find, ownership of a salvaged vessel goes to whoever reaches it first. And there you have my five paragraph summary of the madcap setup for this story. Up to this point we've only heard snippets about a religion called Permanence but with no apparent connection to Rue's mission.
The setup has you thinking you're about to read a Great Starship Race adventure story, but it's a deceptive introduction that really serves to setup the crew of Jentry's Envy, the salvaged Cycler. There does turn out to be more than a single race in the story but it's much more about the significance of the Cycler which Rue has discovered and how it will affect the balance of power in the system.
I can't properly explain how the political structure of this system works. At about a third of the way in we have had various elements of it introduced to us but I can't claim to have comprehended it very well. I'll do my best to summarise what I got out of it. Instead of a Financial Economy it is referred to as a Rights Economy, which is weird to grasp because money is still used to pay for goods and services. There is a governing body, probably made up of planetary governments which are overseen by the Erythrion system government. But the Erythrion system (and presumably other systems of halo worlds) are yet still overseen by Rights Owners back on Earth.
The Rights Owners, as I understood it, own the rights to perform various activities or provide certain types of services and therefore get a slice out of every pie underneath their banner. The Rights Owners have the fattest bank accounts and inevitably hold sway over the decisions made by the governments, but I think it might be in a more direct fashion than simply paying off their favourite politicians. Sorry, this isn't very clear for me.
In this system it is "illegal for a religion not to charge for its services". Religions are an important part of the power structure, with Permanence being the dominant religious group. Permanence is on a kind of eternal pilgrimage to connect all alien life to the meaning of the universe.
There's a group called the Compact which seemed like the Rights Owners of interplanetary travel at the very least. The Compact is in some sort of trouble, but with loyal Cycler crews running the remaining Cyclers in the system for them, they control all travel between the halo planets. Again, apologies for my basic handling of what is probably a complex web of interacting beliefs and systems.
Other than that society seems pretty much as you'd expect it. The rich folks live in nice areas and the poor and working classes live in rougher suburbs with varying levels of (dis)comfort.
"Since the lit worlds abandoned us we haven't seen a new Cycler in 20 years".
Lit worlds are worlds that orbit a large, bright star, like Earth orbiting Sol. Erythrion is the system that our cast live in, named after a brown dwarf star, one which is comparably dim and lower in mass, the halo worlds are those which orbit such stars. Halo worlds like those in the Erythrion system don't have enough gravity for departing ships to fire up their FTL drives so they use these ships called Cyclers instead, which appear to use "plow sails" for both propulsion and protection against particles in space (I pictured these as what we call "solar sails"). Cyclers take a long time to get going but can still reach incredible speeds (sub-lightspeed of course) and it takes a long time to slow them down using complex braking maneuvers.
The author has clearly put a lot of thought into the structure of this system and my lack of understanding should not indicate its impenetrability. I've been distracted by life and I had to stop reading several times to concentrate on real things which unfortunately hindered my processing of the details.
There's just loads of tech in this story, all very futuristic and fun. An example is the "Inscape", which is fairly important to the plot. The inscape is worn as an implant and is somehow configured into the view of the user, so that what a person sees is partly a façade tacked onto reality. Grey concrete walls are transformed to marble, a few scattered streetside stalls are displayed as part of a lively carnival market and that type of thing. Ironically, it costs the user more money to remove the frilly illusions, no doubt a mechanism by the off world Rights Owners for maintaining higher satisfaction among the planetary populations. Much more can be done with these, including removing yourself from other people's views and can you imagine what mayhem might ensue if these devices were hackable? Mmhmm.
This review may represent the highest words:sense ratio that I've written yet, which is not a good feat. Too many words and not enough sense. But I do recommend this book to you and I'll probably come back at it for a second run myself at some point.
The main characters are preeetty good, although I wouldn't call any of them loveable. You certainly root for them to succeed and I really wanted to like the main character, she is about 17 when the story starts and she has escaped the toxic environment of her family life but I just found her to be somewhat inconsistent. The author has her feeling her way through her new found independence which is appropriate, but sometimes frustrating. Sometimes she would make a decision based on whether a person was cute. What? Yeah, I know. And it was so out of place compared with the rest of this reasonably well written book.
The setup is a bit silly but is also a fun series of events. Meadow Rue Cassels, or just Rue as she prefers, bails out of the station where she lived and worked to escape her bully of a brother, Jentry. She shoots her brother in the face then peels out in the shuttle that they had inherited from their late mother. Oh, don't worry. Jentry isn't dead.
It just keeps piling on. Rue has no idea where she's going. The ship's AI informs her that she can make it to another station safely, but when she learns the cost of visiting the station she realises it is well beyond her budget. While she is ruminating over her lack of options the AI announces that a massive comet is registering on sensors. You bloody beauty! Rue is going to be rich and quickly stakes a claim which is legally recognised only hours later. Oh, damn. That's not actually a comet.
When Rue arrives at Treya, the "nearby" planet which had recognised her claim she learns that further investigation revealed her discovery to be another ship rather than the comet which she had hoped to cash in on. She had become something of an overnight celebrity and switched off comms to ignore the inundation of messages from people trying to get their fingers in her pie, so she was completely surprised by the news which she received on arrival. Ah, but don't give up. There is still hope.
Once the news had been updated, the family who she expected to meet on her arrival at Treya deserted her and she arrives to find only a single cousin, Maximilian, is waiting to greet her. It takes a bit of to-and-fro-ing for Rue to learn to trust Max, but he lifts her spirits when he; 1 - Wants to help her claim the vessel and 2 - Turns out to be rich enough to do so. They set up the shuttle for the trip to capture and redirect the wayward "Cycler", organise a slapdash crew and next thing you know Rue is the captain of this crazy plan.
The competition is on though, because other interested parties want to claim the Cycler vessel. Unlike claiming a comet which is done by simply reporting the find, ownership of a salvaged vessel goes to whoever reaches it first. And there you have my five paragraph summary of the madcap setup for this story. Up to this point we've only heard snippets about a religion called Permanence but with no apparent connection to Rue's mission.
The setup has you thinking you're about to read a Great Starship Race adventure story, but it's a deceptive introduction that really serves to setup the crew of Jentry's Envy, the salvaged Cycler. There does turn out to be more than a single race in the story but it's much more about the significance of the Cycler which Rue has discovered and how it will affect the balance of power in the system.
I can't properly explain how the political structure of this system works. At about a third of the way in we have had various elements of it introduced to us but I can't claim to have comprehended it very well. I'll do my best to summarise what I got out of it. Instead of a Financial Economy it is referred to as a Rights Economy, which is weird to grasp because money is still used to pay for goods and services. There is a governing body, probably made up of planetary governments which are overseen by the Erythrion system government. But the Erythrion system (and presumably other systems of halo worlds) are yet still overseen by Rights Owners back on Earth.
The Rights Owners, as I understood it, own the rights to perform various activities or provide certain types of services and therefore get a slice out of every pie underneath their banner. The Rights Owners have the fattest bank accounts and inevitably hold sway over the decisions made by the governments, but I think it might be in a more direct fashion than simply paying off their favourite politicians. Sorry, this isn't very clear for me.
In this system it is "illegal for a religion not to charge for its services". Religions are an important part of the power structure, with Permanence being the dominant religious group. Permanence is on a kind of eternal pilgrimage to connect all alien life to the meaning of the universe.
There's a group called the Compact which seemed like the Rights Owners of interplanetary travel at the very least. The Compact is in some sort of trouble, but with loyal Cycler crews running the remaining Cyclers in the system for them, they control all travel between the halo planets. Again, apologies for my basic handling of what is probably a complex web of interacting beliefs and systems.
Other than that society seems pretty much as you'd expect it. The rich folks live in nice areas and the poor and working classes live in rougher suburbs with varying levels of (dis)comfort.
"Since the lit worlds abandoned us we haven't seen a new Cycler in 20 years".
Lit worlds are worlds that orbit a large, bright star, like Earth orbiting Sol. Erythrion is the system that our cast live in, named after a brown dwarf star, one which is comparably dim and lower in mass, the halo worlds are those which orbit such stars. Halo worlds like those in the Erythrion system don't have enough gravity for departing ships to fire up their FTL drives so they use these ships called Cyclers instead, which appear to use "plow sails" for both propulsion and protection against particles in space (I pictured these as what we call "solar sails"). Cyclers take a long time to get going but can still reach incredible speeds (sub-lightspeed of course) and it takes a long time to slow them down using complex braking maneuvers.
The author has clearly put a lot of thought into the structure of this system and my lack of understanding should not indicate its impenetrability. I've been distracted by life and I had to stop reading several times to concentrate on real things which unfortunately hindered my processing of the details.
There's just loads of tech in this story, all very futuristic and fun. An example is the "Inscape", which is fairly important to the plot. The inscape is worn as an implant and is somehow configured into the view of the user, so that what a person sees is partly a façade tacked onto reality. Grey concrete walls are transformed to marble, a few scattered streetside stalls are displayed as part of a lively carnival market and that type of thing. Ironically, it costs the user more money to remove the frilly illusions, no doubt a mechanism by the off world Rights Owners for maintaining higher satisfaction among the planetary populations. Much more can be done with these, including removing yourself from other people's views and can you imagine what mayhem might ensue if these devices were hackable? Mmhmm.
This review may represent the highest words:sense ratio that I've written yet, which is not a good feat. Too many words and not enough sense. But I do recommend this book to you and I'll probably come back at it for a second run myself at some point.
April 2, 2014
I bought this book a decade ago, after hearing quite a bit of fuss written about it. Already, it has managed to influence many other science fiction universes, with its concentration on brown dwarfs and their planetary systems and the human cultures which have sprung up on their worlds. Read Simon Bisson’s excellent review.
evildrganymede is livejournal’s local expert on brown dwarfs, published and everything, so he can correct me. Briefly put, brown dwarfs are star-like objects which lack sufficient mass to sustain nuclear fusion for more than a few hundred million years, but which are substantially more massive than superjovian planets, ranging between 15 and 70 Jovian masses. Their importance to would-be interstellar colonizers lies in the fact that, as low-mass objects which form through the same processes of stellar condensation as other stars, brown dwarfs should be relatively more common than main-sequence stars capable of sustaining fusion, since it is easier to accumulate (say) 50 Jovian masses worth of material to form a brown dwarf than 500 Jovian masses. Indeed, one survey suggests that there might be twice as many brown dwarf stars as main-sequence stars
evildrganymede is livejournal’s local expert on brown dwarfs, published and everything, so he can correct me. Briefly put, brown dwarfs are star-like objects which lack sufficient mass to sustain nuclear fusion for more than a few hundred million years, but which are substantially more massive than superjovian planets, ranging between 15 and 70 Jovian masses. Their importance to would-be interstellar colonizers lies in the fact that, as low-mass objects which form through the same processes of stellar condensation as other stars, brown dwarfs should be relatively more common than main-sequence stars capable of sustaining fusion, since it is easier to accumulate (say) 50 Jovian masses worth of material to form a brown dwarf than 500 Jovian masses. Indeed, one survey suggests that there might be twice as many brown dwarf stars as main-sequence stars
This has implications for a human interstellar civilization, particularly if the interstellar propulsion methods used are limited by distance, for instance like 2300AD‘s stutterwarp drive. In the 2300AD universe, for instance, within the range of stutterwarp drive from Earth, for instance, there are only five stars–Wolf 359, Barnard’s Star, and the three stars of Alpha Centauri. The limited range of the stutterwarp interstellar drive establishes a highly specific astrographic setting, with the only stars reachable being those which lie within range of other stars which are themselves reachable only by stutterwarp. If there were, in addition to the five main-sequence stars already mentioned, ten brown dwarfs located at random within 7.7 light years of Earth, this would drastically open up the volumes of space accessible to human interstellar civilization. Only the most isolated stars could not be reached. More, there could well be suitable targets for colonization in these brown dwarf planetary systems, which did, after all, form like the planetary systems of main sequence stars. Terrestrial-type planets could be terraformed, moons like the Galilean satellites of Jupiter and Saturn’s Titan could be colonized by people with suitably advanced technological packages, and asteroid belts orbiting Brown Dwarf #1897 would be indistinguishable (for colonization purposes) from asteroid belts at Wolf 359. Superjovian planets in interstellar space might be more common still than brown dwarfs, but again, the same provisos relating to their suitability as way stations for interstellar travellers and destinations for colonization missions apply. Introducing brown dwarfs and superjovian planets to an interstellar civilization should have the effect, in short, of drastically expanding its volume.
The universe of Permanence is one where, for several millennia, human interstellar travel and colonization have tended to focus upon brown dwarfs and superjovian planets in interstellar space. Rue Cassels, Permanence‘s protagonist, was born in a deep-space mining habitat loosely associated with the partly-terraformed world of Erythion. Rue has the misfortune, however, of being born at a time when Earth has invented a particular method of faster-than-light drive that excludes brown dwarfs, superjovians, and their worlds and inhabitants from a nascent interstellar economy–only main-sequence stars are massive enough to create stellar gravity wells which can trigger the jump to faster-than-light travel. This would not be a significant problem but for the fact that slower-than-light starships are immensely more massive than Earth’s quick faster-than-light craft. Slowly but surely, the numerous civilizations which grew up in the wilderness beyond the main-sequence stars are being cut off from interstellar civilization, as civilizations around main-sequence stars are coerced by Earth to abandon slower-than-light travel and the deep-space civilizations realize that they are not wealthy enough to launch slower-than-light starships of their own. Naturally enough, Rue manages to accidentally stumble upon a key to reversing the deep-space civilizations’ decline in a most unexpected manner. (You really should read Simon Bisson’s review.)
I suppose that part of the reason I’m so interested in Permanence is because I come from Prince Edward Island, a province of Canada that has suffered from serious relative decline since it joined Confederation. Like the decline of the brown dwarf/superjovian civilizations in the Permanence universe, PEI’s decline was probably inevitable, since it was too small (in population, land area, wealth) to survive, and lacked the resources and desire to be a self-contained society. Permanence‘s cultures, marginalized just like PEI by broad-scale political integration into a society dominated by a transport/communications network that bypasses them as a matter of course, are much more resilient. (Alien technology definitely helps, at the same time that it can also destabilize things.)
Anyway, I highly recommend Permanence. read it at the library, or better yet buy one. Schroeder definitely deserves to be rewarded.
November 7, 2010
This is a modestly hard sci-fi book. The setting, worlds orbiting brown dwarfs, is ingenious with some good realistic and creative attention to detail. There is an interesting adventure with both action and intrigue though there is maybe a little too much contrivance in setting up the heroine's travails. The protagonist and some of her close associates are quite interesting. The villains are from the "lit" worlds (stars) and represent a government that exploits the "halo" worlds associated with brown dwarfs. Much of the adventure involves the good guys' (the third world halo residents) attempts to throw off the shackles of the exploitive villains who are willing to do anything to maintain their exploitive status. The book raises the question and provides a solution to how civilizations can survive in the long run. It makes the point that sustainable economies cannot always grow and cannot depend on exploiting others if they are to be sustainable. The religious philosophies of a couple of the characters provide food for thought as well. The speculative technology in the book is well done, the plot is not perfect but keeps one's interest, and some of the minor characters could have been fleshed out a little better. All in all this is a very solid work of sci-fi.
December 23, 2017
really a 3.5, but I enjoy his writing..and that's got to be worth 1/2 star...liked the characters too...
May 15, 2023
Rue Cassels vit sur Allemagne (à noter que c’est également l’écriture en VO), une station de minage, et fuit car maltraitée par son frère. Sur le chemin vers sa nouvelle vie, à bord d’une capsule volée, elle tombe sur un objet jamais découvert, le clame financièrement, pensant être un petit astéroïde … Qui se trouve être en fait un vaisseau abandonné - une nouvelle qui fait grand bruit.
Comment un livre peut à ce point mélanger le bon, voire même le très bon, et le médiocre, voire même le mauvais. J’ai vérifié une sacrée paire de fois si le livre n’était pas estampillé YA, histoire que ça m’indique le pourquoi des facilités scénaristiques grosses comme mon pif, mais non.
Donc.
Le très bon d’abord : toutes les discussions sur les aliens, la xénobiologie, la religion bouddhsite du futur qu’est le NeoShinto avec le concept des kamis, sont d’excellentes idées de SF superbement bien exposées, tout comme le système économique et politique dépeint (les cyclers, l’abandon progressif de mondes qui ne rapportent pas assez, etc). Un très bon worldbuilding.
Mais le très mauvais … est vraiment mauvais. Rue s’échappe du joug de son frère, ok. Elle débarque sur le système le plus proche, où elle est immédiatement contactée par sa super riche famille (ok …), qui l’abandonne le semi-moment où, en fait, elle ne pourra pas leur apporter plus de sous (ok…..), SAUF LE cousin paria mais toujours méga riche qui pourra bien sûr sponsoriser la moindre de ses conneries. OK. Bon. Ca vous montre un des problèmes principaux de ce bouquin : les enchaînements d'événements et les liens entre les personnages font forcés, trop rapides, il n’y a juste aucun poids, tout est trop … facile. Rue se retrouve dans une situation complexe ? Lol non deux lignes plus tard c’est résolu. On ne peut pas croire une seule seconde au délire, c’est vraiment dommage. Je suis vraiment restée sur ma faim avec ce livre qui aurait pu être une totale réussite .. mais est un des plus gros gâchis que j’ai pu lire récemment.
Comment un livre peut à ce point mélanger le bon, voire même le très bon, et le médiocre, voire même le mauvais. J’ai vérifié une sacrée paire de fois si le livre n’était pas estampillé YA, histoire que ça m’indique le pourquoi des facilités scénaristiques grosses comme mon pif, mais non.
Donc.
Le très bon d’abord : toutes les discussions sur les aliens, la xénobiologie, la religion bouddhsite du futur qu’est le NeoShinto avec le concept des kamis, sont d’excellentes idées de SF superbement bien exposées, tout comme le système économique et politique dépeint (les cyclers, l’abandon progressif de mondes qui ne rapportent pas assez, etc). Un très bon worldbuilding.
Mais le très mauvais … est vraiment mauvais. Rue s’échappe du joug de son frère, ok. Elle débarque sur le système le plus proche, où elle est immédiatement contactée par sa super riche famille (ok …), qui l’abandonne le semi-moment où, en fait, elle ne pourra pas leur apporter plus de sous (ok…..), SAUF LE cousin paria mais toujours méga riche qui pourra bien sûr sponsoriser la moindre de ses conneries. OK. Bon. Ca vous montre un des problèmes principaux de ce bouquin : les enchaînements d'événements et les liens entre les personnages font forcés, trop rapides, il n’y a juste aucun poids, tout est trop … facile. Rue se retrouve dans une situation complexe ? Lol non deux lignes plus tard c’est résolu. On ne peut pas croire une seule seconde au délire, c’est vraiment dommage. Je suis vraiment restée sur ma faim avec ce livre qui aurait pu être une totale réussite .. mais est un des plus gros gâchis que j’ai pu lire récemment.
June 9, 2025
An intricate setting with many interdependent systems and lots of cool tech and involving different societies each with their own priorities. The setup actually made me think of the Alliance/Union universe of C J Cherryh but this has gone in rather different directions and is exploring other things. It's neat that religions and spirituality play an important role here. The story is a fun adventure with interesting pacing and the characters are relatable. I don't know that I was particularly invested in the adventure or the characters though I did generally enjoy those, but the strength here is the setting and how the story explores that.
September 6, 2013
I enjoyed Permanence's overall story, and really loved the world-building of this novel. However, I found the characters and their motivations to be a bit flat. Though the novel covers a relatively long period of time, relationships seem to develop too quickly/easily and obstacles are overcome too smoothly. Also, because of the story's time-jumps, character behaviors felt inconsistent at times; a lot of character development occurred off-screen, which leaves the reader seeing just a character's "before" and "after", and glosses over their growth in between those two points.
November 10, 2025
Relatively fun worldbuilding and plot; rather poorly written. It felt as, idk, the first draft maybe. Characters' motivations and emotions spelled out too clearly, plot points too obvious, like you could see how it was written but not in the good way. "Okay now my characters need money so we're gonna introduce something that will give them money at oh just the right moment" but repeated every five pages. And overly didactic too.
abandoned
August 6, 2020I tried, but I got tiered of facts that I thought were established and important to the story getting dismissed with a single line. Couple that with the strange time jumps (has it been hours or weeks) and the murkiness of the protagonist (Is she an abused child? Is she a scrappy survivor? Is she a temperamental teenager) I did not care to keep going.
July 27, 2025
Science fiction is often said to come in two forms, hard and soft, but there is another, more unfortunate division: hard science fiction with little or no characterization, and soft science fiction with compelling characters but rather light on the science. I suspect this has much to do with the authors and their motives for writing the stories in the first place. I thoroughly enjoy the idea-heavy, character-light version of hard science fiction, but such stories are inevitably somewhat niche. There are occasional exceptions, like Foundation (which someone somehow decided should be a television series – of all the science fiction stories to adapt to television, I would have put that one last, but the first season (which is all I’ve watched of it) was actually decent, though quite different from the book), but I doubt if
Rocheworld
or
All of an Instant
will ever be common cultural touchstones. There are exceptions, though, hard science fiction stories which also have compelling plots and characters. Certain
Star Trek
episodes make good examples, as does The Martian, and maybe Ender’s Game. Schroeder’s Permanence is another.
It gets off to a bit of a slow start, and, since I was looking for an idea-heavy read, I wasn’t sure I would enjoy it. For the first couple chapters, while the science fiction set dressing is good, and the plot is fast-paced with plenty of action and tension, the story reads as a somewhat predictable asteroid-miner, poor-girl-escaping-to-civilization type story. I’m sure there’s a more literary name for that story archetype, but it’s a pattern I’ve seen several times in other books and other formats, so if that’s all Permanence proved to be, I would have been disappointed. Fortunately, it rapidly becomes much more, weaving in such a variety of ideas and concepts at different scales that, before I reached the end, I already knew I would be thinking about it long after I finished it.
Evolution. It’s not general relativity, quantum chromodynamics, inflationary cosmology, or any other more science fiction-sounding theory. Thermodynamics is technically older, but still feels more appropriate to the science fiction genre, somehow. When it comes to scientific ideas I think about inspiring science fiction stories, evolution is not the one to which I turn, except perhaps in how aliens might develop under different conditions, such as those in Blindsight or Inherit the Stars. In Permanence, evolution is at the core of the story, though it is understated, shown rather than told, and it isn’t until about a third into the book that its prominence becomes apparent. Evolution of both species and societies is the thread running underneath the whole text, and not in the simplistic view suggested by the famous human evolution images, with the silhouettes of various hominids gradually standing more upright.
If an exploration of an interpretation of the implications of the theory of evolution on intelligent, sentient life’s fate in the universe is the core of the book, it is surrounding by layers of other ideas and notions. Technology isn’t really one of them, independently, but the impact of different technologies on societies forms several of the book’s layers. Permanence has FTL, which is never fully explained save that it in some way requires massive gravity wells, because one of the book’s major conflicts is between civilizations which can be connected and reached by FTL, and those which cannot, an older civilization from the days before humanity could travel between the stars, and instead built colonies around brown dwarfs and other orphaned worlds. In Schroeder’s universe, there are brown dwarfs and hot Jupiters littering the voids between the main sequence stars, and these formed the basis for humanity’s first interstellar civilization, before FTL made travel between main sequence stars viable. “Inspace,” a kind of neural-interface-based augmented reality technology, is another technological layer, and the way its manipulation, both by individuals and governments, can affect people and societies forms another conflict. In another author’s hands, each of these might be the subject of their own book, but Schroeder masterfully weaves them into the overall context of his world, characters, and plot.
If you spend much time reading science fiction or about the search for extraterrestrial life, you’ve doubtless come upon the Fermi paradox, the notion that, based on our observations of the conditions in the universe, there ought to be a lot more life out there than we’ve seen evidence for thus far. This has led to all kinds of speculation, both in serious scientific literature and through the medium of science fiction, about what the limiting factor might be. Schlock Mercenary engages with this premise, essentially proposing that intelligent life eventually determines active galaxies are too dangerously unstable and therefore migrates into self-sustained extra-galactic habitats with minimal signatures. Schroeder engages with the premise, too, and the ultimate “solution” to the paradox in Permanence is both a compelling climax to the evolutionary considerations built up throughout the book’s course, and a clever callback to the discovery which forms the book’s opening sequence.
In a sense, there are two stories being told in Permanence, although they are so woven together that neither would stand as an independent novel. The more direct of the two is the story of a network of far-future human civilizations, comprising three main societies: the Cycler Compact, which lives mostly on the orphan and rogue worlds mentioned previously, and which does not possess FTL; the Rights Economy, a dominant, FTL-capable civilization which merges the pervasive, invasive surveillance of Orwell's 1984 with an extreme take on capitalism and ownership; and the rebels, who also have FTL, and who object to the Rights Economy (precisely why, what aspects, and their own positions is never made quite clear, one of the few aspects which Schroeder does not build out as much as I would have wished). We’re told this story primarily via the first perspective character we meet, Rue, and it is the more predictable of the two. If it stood alone, it would be a decent, fairly predictable, quite familiar science fiction plot. Its intersection with the second story makes it far more interesting.
The second story is delivered primarily through Mike, a disillusioned priest of a banned religion, and a research assistant to the preeminent expert on past alien civilizations. Past, because Mike’s disillusionment comes primarily from a lifetime of exploring the ruins of alien civilizations without finding cooperative, living ones. This is where Permanence distinguishes itself from standard science fiction fair as something more imaginative, exploratory, and challenging in its ideas. It sets up a premise that intelligent alien civilizations tend not to endure, and that most of them are so fundamentally unlike humans that cooperation, even basic dialogue, is impossible. If his story stood alone, it would be a fascinating, idea-heavy science fiction story with the typical dearth of engaging plot. By twisting Mike’s and Rue’s stories together, Schroeder patches the weaknesses of each and abets each thread’s strengths.
Schoeder’s writing is not magnificent, glorious prose; it is serviceable, straightforward, largely plain and unornamented. His characters are somewhat understated despite their interest and conflicts, or at least held at a remove from the reader; aside from Mike Bequith, the book does not convey a rich internal life for any of them, even Rue. To do otherwise would, perhaps, distract from the plot and ideas Schroeder sets out to explore, ideas which I could continue waxing eloquent about, except that doing so would spoil the book for you, and I want you to experience its twists, turns, and mind-expanding notions for yourself. So, you should go read Permanence, and then we can have a proper discussion about the potential evolution of cooperative aliens and whether or not sentience is really the pinnacle of evolutionary accomplishment we egotistically assume it to be.
November 30, 2008
This book took a while to get into, but into it we did done got. Er. I've always felt that the best science fiction isn't about the technology, the aliens, or the general freedom it gives to authors to just make up stuff they think is neat. Those stories work only with readers who share the fantasies that the author is playing out. Great science fiction is about people. The speculative aspect of science fiction allows the author to give relevance to an idea that would be entirely abstract in real life.
I do rant. The setting of Permanence was just that: a setting. The real story was about the ideas that the characters forwarded. Not as heavy as some things I've read, but it did touch on some of the essentials of taoist/buddhist philosophy and (briefly but significantly) on the subject of memes. The author showed some self-consciousness in the amount of explaining that he did of certain things, but overall it was a smooth read.
I do rant. The setting of Permanence was just that: a setting. The real story was about the ideas that the characters forwarded. Not as heavy as some things I've read, but it did touch on some of the essentials of taoist/buddhist philosophy and (briefly but significantly) on the subject of memes. The author showed some self-consciousness in the amount of explaining that he did of certain things, but overall it was a smooth read.
January 5, 2016
I was surprised at how good this was! It's got some very believable alien and space environments together with some novel ideas about humans interacting with aliens and the ultimate destiny of humans in space. The characters felt realistic and I cared about what happened to them. I must admit to finding the basic plot inherently interesting (it's kind of like Rendezvous with Rama but bigger in scope and with more action).
For some reason I found this hard to read quickly, but it was still engaging. Perhaps the space environments and situations took a lot of thought to understand well. I'm glad this was recommended to me by a friend. Maybe I shouldn't have taken two years to get around to reading it.
For some reason I found this hard to read quickly, but it was still engaging. Perhaps the space environments and situations took a lot of thought to understand well. I'm glad this was recommended to me by a friend. Maybe I shouldn't have taken two years to get around to reading it.
November 7, 2009
There's aspects of this book that if someone told me it as a concept, I would probably react negatively to it and never read it. Mistake. Big mistake. Schroeder takes this plot and characters and weaves a really good tale out of it. It's not "high fiction", but it doesn't pretend to be. It is a solid, well-planned and executed story about a technology and civilization that exists for these characters to populate, suffer and succeed in.
This book makes the author someone who I want to keep in mind as he delivers his next several visions of people and worlds. I think it excels at the SF "curse" of creating a universe just to work your story in. If you don't automatically reject the genre, get this and read it.
This book makes the author someone who I want to keep in mind as he delivers his next several visions of people and worlds. I think it excels at the SF "curse" of creating a universe just to work your story in. If you don't automatically reject the genre, get this and read it.
November 25, 2018
I really enjoyed this space romp. My only little criticism is that it starts out entirely from Rue Cassels viewpoint and abruptly changes viewpoint to Michael Bequith about 100 pages in. I wasn't expecting it and it was a little jarring. On the small scale, the story is about Rue and her attempts to get away from her controlling half-brother and to find her place in the world. On the macro scale, it's about competing philosophies about how to keep a large, far-flung group of human colonies in touch with and trading with one another, and what makes us human. Recommended.
November 25, 2018
Summary: Another good SF book, interesting premise, believable, and nicely complicated with a good set of characters. Karl seems to specialise in backward wolds set in future times, this less so, but the ingredients are all there.. Highly recommended
Plotline: Lengthy, rags to riches, plenty of action and all built around the complex premise
Premise: Love it, Aliens wiped out and humans heading the same way
Writing: The reader is right there in the action.
Ending: Well yes, very satisfactory
Pace: Never a dull moment!
Plotline: Lengthy, rags to riches, plenty of action and all built around the complex premise
Premise: Love it, Aliens wiped out and humans heading the same way
Writing: The reader is right there in the action.
Ending: Well yes, very satisfactory
Pace: Never a dull moment!
November 8, 2012
I read this for my SciFi book club. There are a lot of great ideas in this book, enough for several books. Unfortuneately, almost none of them are well explored, some only getting a brief mention before moving on. The character development is almost non-existant. The plot is ok, but uneven and jumpy - you can't tell how much time has elapsed between scenes, etc.
May 8, 2025
Permanence is classical Big Dumb Object space opera, with weaknesses in characterization and plotting papered over with quick writing and some actually interesting ideas about deep time.
Rue Cassels is escaping from her abusive half-brother and the tiny cometary mining station she calls home when she stumbles across a find of incredible, mind-boggling wealth. A distant speck of light is not just a chunk of rock, not just a slower-than-light Cycler starship, but an alien Cycler. The discovery tosses Rue into the deep end of human politics.
Small-town girl Rue is a mite out of her depth (despite deep wells of cunning, decency, and resilience), and xenoarcheologist Michael Bequith becomes a secondary point of view. Bequith is much more interesting than the standard YA protagonist is Rue. He's the human fixer for the truly gifted Dr. Herat, but both of them have become disenchanted with their discipline. For decades, humanity has been searching for aliens that they could have diplomatic relationships with. However, while life is common, sentient technological life is incredibly rare. The handful of existing equivalent species will have nothing to do with humans out of various forms of revulsion: Autotrophs find the fact that we eat grotesque. Slyphs regard altering the environment to suit you rather than vice-versa a sin worthy of genocide. And there's a species of nomadic interstellar solipsists. Every other species is dead, nothing than more than ruins, many of then wiped out 65 million years ago by a theorized empire of Von Neumann berseker probes called the Chicxulub.
Herat has about given up hope, and so has Besquith. His academic work is a cover for his banned religion of NeoShintoism, which uses AI and VR to capture the Kami of alien worlds, but an experience on a ringworld fragment has left Besquith profoundly shaken.
Rue's Cycler, the Envy, represents a lot of hope. For Rue, it's wealth, freedom, and a lifeline for her civilization based in the dark halo worlds, which have been bypassed by the FTL ships of Earth's Rights Economy. For Besquith, it's a chance to find his faith again. And for Admiral Chrisler of the Right's Economy, it's a chance to win a war that's his side is losing via unloosing automated weapons, whatever the cost.
The parts that I found most interesting concern the Right's Economy and the Chicxulub. The Right's Economy is a nightmare of DRM, where everything has a price and money and is funneled upwards to Right's Owners back on Earth. Even military starships require constant microtransactions to operate. Most people find this awful, and a growing rebellion is winning the war. Yet some kind of unified government is necessary to prevent humanity from splintering into transhuman fragments. (Notably, Rue is off-baseline. Growing up on a cold and dim cometary hab means she finds ordinary light and heat blinding and stifling. Unclear how much is genetics and how much is just adaptation). And both the Rights Economy and the rebels, using FTL ships that only work around major stars, would leave Rue's home of the Cycler Compact habitats to wither and die.
The sweep of big ideas makes up for some, well, not bad characterization, but not exactly great characterization and plotting. Rue, for all her good qualities, get by mostly on luck. Some of which is expected (hey, we need an inciting incident of finding the starship), some of which is earned (and she should be able to turn it on), but there's one chance drift into a secret rebel base which really stretched my credulity. The Rights Economy seems like a bad joke, but given that this book came out in 2002, the iTunes Store opened in 2003, and the Oblivion Horse Armor DLC fiasco happened in 2006, Schroeder was weirdly prescient--an apt bit of writing given that he's also a serious futurist.
Rue Cassels is escaping from her abusive half-brother and the tiny cometary mining station she calls home when she stumbles across a find of incredible, mind-boggling wealth. A distant speck of light is not just a chunk of rock, not just a slower-than-light Cycler starship, but an alien Cycler. The discovery tosses Rue into the deep end of human politics.
Small-town girl Rue is a mite out of her depth (despite deep wells of cunning, decency, and resilience), and xenoarcheologist Michael Bequith becomes a secondary point of view. Bequith is much more interesting than the standard YA protagonist is Rue. He's the human fixer for the truly gifted Dr. Herat, but both of them have become disenchanted with their discipline. For decades, humanity has been searching for aliens that they could have diplomatic relationships with. However, while life is common, sentient technological life is incredibly rare. The handful of existing equivalent species will have nothing to do with humans out of various forms of revulsion: Autotrophs find the fact that we eat grotesque. Slyphs regard altering the environment to suit you rather than vice-versa a sin worthy of genocide. And there's a species of nomadic interstellar solipsists. Every other species is dead, nothing than more than ruins, many of then wiped out 65 million years ago by a theorized empire of Von Neumann berseker probes called the Chicxulub.
Herat has about given up hope, and so has Besquith. His academic work is a cover for his banned religion of NeoShintoism, which uses AI and VR to capture the Kami of alien worlds, but an experience on a ringworld fragment has left Besquith profoundly shaken.
Rue's Cycler, the Envy, represents a lot of hope. For Rue, it's wealth, freedom, and a lifeline for her civilization based in the dark halo worlds, which have been bypassed by the FTL ships of Earth's Rights Economy. For Besquith, it's a chance to find his faith again. And for Admiral Chrisler of the Right's Economy, it's a chance to win a war that's his side is losing via unloosing automated weapons, whatever the cost.
The parts that I found most interesting concern the Right's Economy and the Chicxulub. The Right's Economy is a nightmare of DRM, where everything has a price and money and is funneled upwards to Right's Owners back on Earth. Even military starships require constant microtransactions to operate. Most people find this awful, and a growing rebellion is winning the war. Yet some kind of unified government is necessary to prevent humanity from splintering into transhuman fragments. (Notably, Rue is off-baseline. Growing up on a cold and dim cometary hab means she finds ordinary light and heat blinding and stifling. Unclear how much is genetics and how much is just adaptation). And both the Rights Economy and the rebels, using FTL ships that only work around major stars, would leave Rue's home of the Cycler Compact habitats to wither and die.
The sweep of big ideas makes up for some, well, not bad characterization, but not exactly great characterization and plotting. Rue, for all her good qualities, get by mostly on luck. Some of which is expected (hey, we need an inciting incident of finding the starship), some of which is earned (and she should be able to turn it on), but there's one chance drift into a secret rebel base which really stretched my credulity. The Rights Economy seems like a bad joke, but given that this book came out in 2002, the iTunes Store opened in 2003, and the Oblivion Horse Armor DLC fiasco happened in 2006, Schroeder was weirdly prescient--an apt bit of writing given that he's also a serious futurist.
July 6, 2021
Permanence is a space opera with a great central idea surrounded by a decent novel. As the title suggests, the main thrust of the book is occupied with the question of how mankind (or any species ) can sustain itself long term, and what forms the society could take. To answer this question it opposes two societies, one a low energy, cooperative group of planets living in the dark between stars, and the other an FTL libertarian dystopia where everything is owned and even simple actions require royalty payments. What unfolds is a thoughtful scenario that proposes the ultimate fate of any intelligent civilization, and how they might best endure.
The rest of the novel doesn’t quite measure up to these ideas. While I admit the book is a page turner, I was never fully invested in the struggles of the two protagonists. The introduction of the book is clunky, as it has to introduce and then show the decline of a civilization in very short terms. That is one example of a larger issue where the book leans pretty heavily on dense exposition. And while the book is exciting, and a cool space opera setting, I had difficulty keeping track of the details and descriptions - there are only so many bubble or cylinder shaped objects that I can keep track of at once.
Ultimately my feelings on this book are much like my feelings on another of Karl Schröder’s that I’ve read (Lockstep) - a brilliant idea for for the future with compelling implications, but somewhat flat human drama. Nonetheless, I’d recommend this book. Sustainability should be on everyone’s minds, and few people have such an imaginative take on it as this author.
The rest of the novel doesn’t quite measure up to these ideas. While I admit the book is a page turner, I was never fully invested in the struggles of the two protagonists. The introduction of the book is clunky, as it has to introduce and then show the decline of a civilization in very short terms. That is one example of a larger issue where the book leans pretty heavily on dense exposition. And while the book is exciting, and a cool space opera setting, I had difficulty keeping track of the details and descriptions - there are only so many bubble or cylinder shaped objects that I can keep track of at once.
Ultimately my feelings on this book are much like my feelings on another of Karl Schröder’s that I’ve read (Lockstep) - a brilliant idea for for the future with compelling implications, but somewhat flat human drama. Nonetheless, I’d recommend this book. Sustainability should be on everyone’s minds, and few people have such an imaginative take on it as this author.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 6, 2013
Non mais dites donc ! Si Ventus, son précédent roman était pas mal, il m'avait laissé un goût d'incomplet, ou plutôt un côté pas complètement éclairci (1). Heureusement pour moi, ça n'est vraiment pas le cas de ce roman, qu'on peut tout de suite placer dans la catégorie des très, très bons romans.
Mais reprenons du commencement. Dans ce roman, on suit d'abord les aventures de Rue Cassels, une jeune femme qui, par un jeu de circonstances de l'ordre de l'extraordinaire (2), se retrouve en possession d'un vaisseau spatial étrange. Rapidement, elle se retrouve accompagnée par un tas de personnages assez sympathiques - ou pas. Evidement, le plus intéressant d'entre eux est Michael ... heu ... j'ai oublié son nom.
Comme je l'ai dit dès le début, j'ai trouvé ce roman très intéressant, pour bien des raisons d'ailleurs.
La première, c'est simple, c'est une révélation. A un moment, Michael, tiraillé par une crise de sa foi non métaphysique, nous fait entrevoir le destin inéluctable de l'espèce humaine et, d'une certaine façon, son unicité. Si je me souviens bien (3), il commence par expliquer que toutes les civilisations spatio-pérégrines se sont éteintes, pour une raison simple et franchement terrifiante à l'échelle humaine : pour vivre dans l'espace, il faut être adaptable, mais être adaptable, c'est un trait qui apparaît seulement chez les espèces inadaptées à leur milieu, et ça veut aussi dire le maintien de conditions de vies non naturelles, et donc forcément sujettes à extinction, ce qui implique la destruction de l'espèce. En un mot comme en cent, Schroeder prononce dans ce roman la fin obligatoire de l'Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Et ça, pour moi, c'est un choc. Parce qu'il ne prononce pas "la fin de la civilisation telle que nous la connaissons", ni la fin de l'humanité unifiée. Non, lui, il prononce la fin de l'être humain en tant qu'espèce. C'est-à-dire que, selon lui, la seule chose qui permettrait à l'homme de survivre plus de quelques millions d'année, c'est de ne plus être humain, mais aussi, et surtout, de ne plus être conscient. Effrayant, en un sens, non ?
Donc, ça, c'est une révélation qui m'a beaucoup fait réfléchir.
L'autre attrait de ce roman,c 'est la façon de révérer l'univers qu'ont les héros, chacun à leur manière. Michael essaye de trouver l'esprit divin de chaque lieu, et Rue quant à elle essaye de faire de sa vie quelque chose qui mérite d'être revécu, car elle est persuadée que l'unviers est cyclique, et que sa vie, qu'elle le veuille ou non, lui reviendra à la figure. Des conceptions très différentes de notre monde, pour un monde lui aussi très différent, et très poétique, j'ai trouvé.
Enfin, la partie poétique, pour être honnête, ce sont bien évidement ces mondes du Halo, plongés dans une pénombre naturelle que ne peuvent changer que des soleils artificiels nourris à la magnétosphère des étoiles naines autour desquelles gravitent ces mondes (rien que de l'écrire, je trouve ça beau). Parce que de l'autre côté, c'est-àdire dans l'économie des droits, c'est autre chose. je pense - à titre purement personnel - que c'est dans cette économie que l'auteur a essayé d'être le plus prospectiviste. il an ainsi choisi de nous présenter une civilisation spatiale ne cherchant que le maintien d'un état de fait inacceptable, dans un univers qui ne peut pas être vu de cette manière. Qui plus est, l'état de fait qu'il nous présente, avec les droits attachés à chaque objet, m'a furieusement fait penser à une version légèrement futuriste du système capitalistique actuel. La grande force dans cette civilisation, d'ailleurs, c'est que l'auteur ne prend pas vraiment partie. oh, bien sûr, on sent bien que les rebelles ont sa sympathie. Mais c'est peutêtre parce qu'ils favorisent indirectement les mondes du Halo sur lesquels s'appuie l'intrigue du roman. Mais ça n'est pas très franc. Et ça permet du reste - comme d'habitude, j'aurais tendance à dire - à l'auteur d'être moins manichéen dans la vision de cette société, et du coup beaucoup plus percutant dans son analyse de ce système économique.
Je pourrais dire encore bien des choses, je pense, de ce roman, positives pour la plupart (comme les intercepteurs de la fin, qui sont une espèce de saut quantique dans cet univers, et d'incroyable machine à sensations pour le lecteur), négatives pour certaines (comme le côté un peu facile de l'intrigue, mais je pense que c'est presque voulu). Mais je crois que ce serait louper le coeur de cette histoire, qui ne tient pas vraiment à la course après l'étrange artefact extra-terrestre qui va changer l'univers (puisque c'est le style de récit space-op dans lequel s'inscrit théoriquement ce roman), mais beaucoup plus à la réflexion sur le destin des civilisations, la vacuité d'une volonté expansionniste qui ne permet pas réellement d'exister sur le long terme, et plus de promettre aux voisins galactiques un joyeux feu d'artifice.
A titre tout à fait personnel, tout cela m'a énormément plu. C'est un roman solide, profond (même si Rue m'a parue un peu archétypale, dans son rôle de cheftaine scoute toujours prête à repousser ses limites, mais pétrie de doutes sur ses moyens), intéressant par sa conclusion qui est loin, très loin d'être claire quand j'y réfléchis bien. A mon sens, tout cela suffit largement à en faire l'un des tous meilleurs space-opera ... Bon, j'ai dit ça il y a peu de temps pour Sculpteurs de ciel et c'est vrai pour les deux, même si ce sont des romans très différents. mais c'est ça l'intérêt majeur de la science-fiction, non ? Offrir des oeuvres toujours renouvellées, toujours intéressantes, dans des directions très différentes.
(1) Je veux dire par là que certaines choses n'étaient pas complètement claires une fois la dernière page lue.
(2) Pratchett nous dirait qu'en toute logique, comme il y a environ une chance sur un million pour que ça arrive, ça arrive en fait neuf fois sur dix. Mais on n'est pas chez Pratchett, et le concours de
circonstance qui la rend fabuleusement riche est tout sauf commun.
(3) Oui, c'est un spoiler, oui, j'abuse des notes de pied de page, mais je fais un peu ce que je veux, pas vrai ? Quant au spoiler, il est assez mineur et avant tout d'ordre, comment dire ? D'ordre philosophique.
Mais reprenons du commencement. Dans ce roman, on suit d'abord les aventures de Rue Cassels, une jeune femme qui, par un jeu de circonstances de l'ordre de l'extraordinaire (2), se retrouve en possession d'un vaisseau spatial étrange. Rapidement, elle se retrouve accompagnée par un tas de personnages assez sympathiques - ou pas. Evidement, le plus intéressant d'entre eux est Michael ... heu ... j'ai oublié son nom.
Comme je l'ai dit dès le début, j'ai trouvé ce roman très intéressant, pour bien des raisons d'ailleurs.
La première, c'est simple, c'est une révélation. A un moment, Michael, tiraillé par une crise de sa foi non métaphysique, nous fait entrevoir le destin inéluctable de l'espèce humaine et, d'une certaine façon, son unicité. Si je me souviens bien (3), il commence par expliquer que toutes les civilisations spatio-pérégrines se sont éteintes, pour une raison simple et franchement terrifiante à l'échelle humaine : pour vivre dans l'espace, il faut être adaptable, mais être adaptable, c'est un trait qui apparaît seulement chez les espèces inadaptées à leur milieu, et ça veut aussi dire le maintien de conditions de vies non naturelles, et donc forcément sujettes à extinction, ce qui implique la destruction de l'espèce. En un mot comme en cent, Schroeder prononce dans ce roman la fin obligatoire de l'Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Et ça, pour moi, c'est un choc. Parce qu'il ne prononce pas "la fin de la civilisation telle que nous la connaissons", ni la fin de l'humanité unifiée. Non, lui, il prononce la fin de l'être humain en tant qu'espèce. C'est-à-dire que, selon lui, la seule chose qui permettrait à l'homme de survivre plus de quelques millions d'année, c'est de ne plus être humain, mais aussi, et surtout, de ne plus être conscient. Effrayant, en un sens, non ?
Donc, ça, c'est une révélation qui m'a beaucoup fait réfléchir.
L'autre attrait de ce roman,c 'est la façon de révérer l'univers qu'ont les héros, chacun à leur manière. Michael essaye de trouver l'esprit divin de chaque lieu, et Rue quant à elle essaye de faire de sa vie quelque chose qui mérite d'être revécu, car elle est persuadée que l'unviers est cyclique, et que sa vie, qu'elle le veuille ou non, lui reviendra à la figure. Des conceptions très différentes de notre monde, pour un monde lui aussi très différent, et très poétique, j'ai trouvé.
Enfin, la partie poétique, pour être honnête, ce sont bien évidement ces mondes du Halo, plongés dans une pénombre naturelle que ne peuvent changer que des soleils artificiels nourris à la magnétosphère des étoiles naines autour desquelles gravitent ces mondes (rien que de l'écrire, je trouve ça beau). Parce que de l'autre côté, c'est-àdire dans l'économie des droits, c'est autre chose. je pense - à titre purement personnel - que c'est dans cette économie que l'auteur a essayé d'être le plus prospectiviste. il an ainsi choisi de nous présenter une civilisation spatiale ne cherchant que le maintien d'un état de fait inacceptable, dans un univers qui ne peut pas être vu de cette manière. Qui plus est, l'état de fait qu'il nous présente, avec les droits attachés à chaque objet, m'a furieusement fait penser à une version légèrement futuriste du système capitalistique actuel. La grande force dans cette civilisation, d'ailleurs, c'est que l'auteur ne prend pas vraiment partie. oh, bien sûr, on sent bien que les rebelles ont sa sympathie. Mais c'est peutêtre parce qu'ils favorisent indirectement les mondes du Halo sur lesquels s'appuie l'intrigue du roman. Mais ça n'est pas très franc. Et ça permet du reste - comme d'habitude, j'aurais tendance à dire - à l'auteur d'être moins manichéen dans la vision de cette société, et du coup beaucoup plus percutant dans son analyse de ce système économique.
Je pourrais dire encore bien des choses, je pense, de ce roman, positives pour la plupart (comme les intercepteurs de la fin, qui sont une espèce de saut quantique dans cet univers, et d'incroyable machine à sensations pour le lecteur), négatives pour certaines (comme le côté un peu facile de l'intrigue, mais je pense que c'est presque voulu). Mais je crois que ce serait louper le coeur de cette histoire, qui ne tient pas vraiment à la course après l'étrange artefact extra-terrestre qui va changer l'univers (puisque c'est le style de récit space-op dans lequel s'inscrit théoriquement ce roman), mais beaucoup plus à la réflexion sur le destin des civilisations, la vacuité d'une volonté expansionniste qui ne permet pas réellement d'exister sur le long terme, et plus de promettre aux voisins galactiques un joyeux feu d'artifice.
A titre tout à fait personnel, tout cela m'a énormément plu. C'est un roman solide, profond (même si Rue m'a parue un peu archétypale, dans son rôle de cheftaine scoute toujours prête à repousser ses limites, mais pétrie de doutes sur ses moyens), intéressant par sa conclusion qui est loin, très loin d'être claire quand j'y réfléchis bien. A mon sens, tout cela suffit largement à en faire l'un des tous meilleurs space-opera ... Bon, j'ai dit ça il y a peu de temps pour Sculpteurs de ciel et c'est vrai pour les deux, même si ce sont des romans très différents. mais c'est ça l'intérêt majeur de la science-fiction, non ? Offrir des oeuvres toujours renouvellées, toujours intéressantes, dans des directions très différentes.
(1) Je veux dire par là que certaines choses n'étaient pas complètement claires une fois la dernière page lue.
(2) Pratchett nous dirait qu'en toute logique, comme il y a environ une chance sur un million pour que ça arrive, ça arrive en fait neuf fois sur dix. Mais on n'est pas chez Pratchett, et le concours de
circonstance qui la rend fabuleusement riche est tout sauf commun.
(3) Oui, c'est un spoiler, oui, j'abuse des notes de pied de page, mais je fais un peu ce que je veux, pas vrai ? Quant au spoiler, il est assez mineur et avant tout d'ordre, comment dire ? D'ordre philosophique.
July 16, 2022
A close friend (whose review you can find on this very website, shh) recommends this every single time someone mentions that they wish the world had more optimistic science fiction, and I see exactly why.
It would be reductive to refer to the two main factions of this book as Space Capitalism and Space Socialism, but not TOO much so. This somewhat reminds me of The Dispossessed, in that the primary conflict is almost backdrop, and is mostly used to further discussions of philosophy and politics. One of the primary themes of the book's philosophy is quite explicitly stated (with the rather unfortunate name of The Supreme Meme, a name that I'm certain didn't invoke as many eyerolls when it invoked the mental image of Richard Dawkins and not cat pictures with impact font): how perfect would your life need to be to change nothing about it if you had to do it all over again?
Unfortunately, I think that I'm supposed to find that question thought-provoking, but I instead just find it to be *grievously* unsettling. So I, personally, would not describe this book as "optimistic", past the usual space opera tropes of "good guys win with some sacrifices along the way". It does make me think, though. <3
It would be reductive to refer to the two main factions of this book as Space Capitalism and Space Socialism, but not TOO much so. This somewhat reminds me of The Dispossessed, in that the primary conflict is almost backdrop, and is mostly used to further discussions of philosophy and politics. One of the primary themes of the book's philosophy is quite explicitly stated (with the rather unfortunate name of The Supreme Meme, a name that I'm certain didn't invoke as many eyerolls when it invoked the mental image of Richard Dawkins and not cat pictures with impact font): how perfect would your life need to be to change nothing about it if you had to do it all over again?
Unfortunately, I think that I'm supposed to find that question thought-provoking, but I instead just find it to be *grievously* unsettling. So I, personally, would not describe this book as "optimistic", past the usual space opera tropes of "good guys win with some sacrifices along the way". It does make me think, though. <3
August 15, 2020
The only thing well done about this novel is the world building. Characters behave inconsistently, depending on what the next plot point needs to be - sometimes even in the next paragraph - making them impossible to connect with. The prose is dull, clunky, and frequently worded weirdly with information given after you needed it, especially setting descriptions (if they’re even given at all). Boring bits are dramatized ad nauseam, while bits that would have been really cool to experience are narrated in fly-by fashion after the fact.
I kept reading, hoping to discover why on earth a big publisher would ever acquire it. Nope, it was badly, badly crafted all the way to the last page.
I kept reading, hoping to discover why on earth a big publisher would ever acquire it. Nope, it was badly, badly crafted all the way to the last page.
May 24, 2024
While I won't say this is my favorite space opera of all time, I can say it goes well above and beyond the average. If the point is to have fun, to grow as a person while running for a dream that practically landed in your lap, and then to discover you have a calling, then this book pretty much slams it.
It's highly balanced SF, with fun characters, well-thought-out worldbuilding (or rather, universe-building), interesting aliens, and mysterious spacecraft with twists as to their nature. We get to explore a lot of places, get into wild new troubles, and moreover -- it's satisfying.
There's commentary, of course, but the story and the journey is king.
Well worth it.
It's highly balanced SF, with fun characters, well-thought-out worldbuilding (or rather, universe-building), interesting aliens, and mysterious spacecraft with twists as to their nature. We get to explore a lot of places, get into wild new troubles, and moreover -- it's satisfying.
There's commentary, of course, but the story and the journey is king.
Well worth it.
April 7, 2018
This is a very typical Male Science Fiction Author book (the good kind, at least) in that it had absolutely mind-bendingly fascinating sci-fi ideas and forgettable characters and relationships between them. When I think about this book a year from now, I will not remember the name of a single character, but I will definitely remember the unique aliens, provocative ideas, and universe-altering technology.
August 23, 2020
A fascinating book that explores how we relate to the universe, which is both ancient and vast, both in a physical and spiritual sense. The settings described are fascinating and focus on science that is not often discussed. While the ending seemed rushed, almost as if the author woke up and realised he had to hand the book in that afternoon, the plot is exciting, engaging and thought provoking.
July 31, 2024
Some interesting ideas and multiple themes: a coming-of-age story; alien contact that defies the usual clichés; sociopolitical and economic roadblocks presented by faster than light travel (or lack thereof); spirituality in an age of cyberware. But the plot points get murky and things are weighted down through sheer repetition. Not enough here to warrant 470 pages....edit, edit, EDIT!
July 18, 2025
I read this book because it was mentioned in the afterward to Peter Watts' Blind Sight. He said Permanence reached the opposite conclusion that he did about consciousness.
Permanence has some interesting and cool ideas but they are wrapped in a too long space opera that is not very interesting. I read about halfway through then skimmed the rest.
Permanence has some interesting and cool ideas but they are wrapped in a too long space opera that is not very interesting. I read about halfway through then skimmed the rest.
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