The Golden Transcendence

The Golden Oecumene #3

by John C. Wright

Begun with The Golden Age , continued with The Phoenix Exultant , and now concluding in The Golden Transcendence , The Golden Age trilogy is Grand Space Opera, an SF adventure saga in the tradition of A. E. Van Gogt, Roger Zelazny and Cordwainer Smith. It is an astounding story of super-science, a thrilling wonder story that recaptures the elan of SF's golden age writers in the suspenseful and passionate tale of Phaeton, a lone rebel unhappy in utopia.

The end of the Millennium is imminent, when all minds, human, posthuman, cybernetic, sophotechnic, will be temporarily merged into one solar-system-spanning supermind called the Transcendence. This is not only the fulfillment of a thousand years of dreams, it is a day of doom, when the universal mind will pass judgment on the all the races of humanity and transhumanity.

The mighty ship Phoenix Exultant is at last in the hands of her master, Phaethon the Exile is at her helm and his dream of starflight in alive once more. He is being hunted by alien agents, the eerie and deadly Lords of the Silent Oecumene, who would steal the Phoenix Exultant and turn it into a weapon.

The all-encompassing Mind of the Golden Transcendence is waking. Will it endorse Phaeton's dream or face the first interstellar war?

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Singularity, Fantasy, Science Fiction Fantasy, College

414 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

John C. Wright (John Charles Justin Wright, born 1961) is an American author of science fiction and fantasy novels. A Nebula award finalist (for the fantasy novel Orphans of Chaos), he was called "this fledgling century's most important new SF talent" by Publishers Weekly (after publication of his debut novel, The Golden Age).

Reviews

[Kevin Kuhn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I did it, I finished “The Golden Age” trilogy. It feels like an accomplishment. The trilogy itself has been a paradox for me. Flawed in many ways, yet brilliant and intriguing. As a whole, it is richly layered, complex, intellectual, and damaged, imperfect, and blemished. For those of you new to the series it takes place ten thousand years in the future, in a fully and diversely populated solar system. Mankind is joined by a variety of post-human and artificial intelligence in a solar system that has been remade. The sun has been tamed, planets have been relocated and reformed. Jupiter has been ignited, and the entire system has been populated with all manner of intelligence.

Author John C. Wright has imagined an erudite, multifaceted, and elaborate future that feels probable and genuine. His tale is complex, with great profundity. He has heroic characters and epic settings and a plot that weaves and unravels throughout the trilogy. There is a parade of entities, some human, some post-human, and some fascinating forms of machine intelligence. Author Wright explores the many ways they interact, with layers and layers of different sensory filters and communication devices. It’s all mind-stretching and dazzling, and yet . . . yet . . . imho, it's profoundly broken. I was astonished and amazed, but I never once felt any real emotion for a character. I only briefly saw the words turn into a story in my head, momentarily in the second and third books when action drives the plot. But through most of the trilogy there is massive amounts of exposition. It’s brainy and mesmerizing, but it’s chocked full of narration. And it feels more like a textbook than a novel. The characters never come alive, instead they feel like puppets on wires. The plot never feels sincere, instead remains a story, a tale that I appreciate from a distance without sentiment or emotion.

The third book continues the trend of sexualizing female characters. They have no role other than erotic puppets. Every time they appear, we hear about curves and pouts and giggles. There is a scene in the interior of the sun, with mind-blowing technology to keep the insane forces of gravity and temperature at bay. Yet, main female character, Daphne appears with a sunhat, a skirt and high-heeled pumps. I mean entities are reconstituted, just to exist in the environment and somehow Daphne shows up in pumps!!!!!

I enjoyed the plot of the third book up until the actual transcendence, and then the ‘telling’ become overwhelming for me. I slogged through page after page of narration explaining how transcending the transcendence was, but there was no meat to the event. Afterwards, the plot became convoluted and longwinded. I pushed through to the end, where I did enjoy many loose ends being tied and explained, but more from an intellectual capacity verses the typical satisfaction of a good story resolving itself.

But here is the paradox, for all the flaws, I still enjoyed this trilogy. It was incredibly imaginative and bright. It was rich and complex and unpredictable. I’m going to give both the final novel and the series four stars. Worthwhile for the intelligent imagining of a distant future, but imperfect and falls short as an enjoyable, honest, and emotional story.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the eve of the Transcendence, Phaethon takes the Phoenix Exultant into the very heart of the sun to confront his enemy, the Nothing Sophotech, agent of the Silent Oecumene. Can he stop the Nothing before the Nothing launches a sneak attack during the Golden Transcendence? And does he want to?

Wow. I was hoping Wright could wrap up The Golden Age saga in a satisfactory fashion and he did. I can't say much about the plot without giving too much away. I will say that Atkins proved to be even more capable than originally intended and I was delighted when he mentioned his childhood on Mars and Uncle Kassad. Phaethon's reunion with Helion was well done and his relationship with Daphne was my favorite part of the book. Actually, that's not completely true. This volume had more humor than the previous two. I particularly liked when Diomedes was asking Helion questions about human reproduction on pages 192-193. "I wonder if Phaethon would mind if I helped him."

Now that the Golden Age saga has come to a close, I'd say it's like a retelling of Roger Zelanzy's First Chronicle of Amber, in a Vancian space opera setting, with a healthy dose of humor reminiscent of Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. It's quite a read if you can survive being thrown into the deep end of the pool while wearing cement shoes in regard to all the concepts introduced early on. It's a sf epic that should not be missed.

[Kalin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Golden Oecumene trilogy is perhaps the most ambitious space opera (and novel, for that matter) I have read so far. It is also one of the cleverest, most visionary, provocative, and ... the hell with those epithets. I'm not up to it. Browse the quotes I added, try the books themselves.

There's more to my silence though. I am disappointed by the ending: by the ultimate philosophy of the book (or at least what I got from it). After having that huge smile on my face during the Transcendence (because, aye, if a superintellect cannot smile at the Universe, there must be something superdumb about it), the promise of more war and grimness was just ... just ... hell, it was ugly. :(

Curiously, a similar thing happened when I finished War In Heaven. (Zindell's Requiem for Homo Sapiens, I should say, remains the more convincing, more welcome vision for me. By far. It probably helps that Zindell is well-versed in Eastern philosophy, unlike Wright, who seems to specialize in Western one.) Some elements of that ending felt so artificial that to this day I harbor a suspicion it was forced by an editor or a pressing deadline. :(

Moral of the story: We do have to write the books we need to read. Tolkien knew best.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 Stars

4.5 Stars for the series


3 Stars for The Golden Transcendence and 4.5 for the Golden Age series. I was extremely disappointed with this last installment of the series. It was not a mystery like book one, it was not a quest like book two, and it was more like a philosophical babble war inside an epic space opera fight for the world. To me that there was far too much time spent psycho analyzing every detail and possible outcome between the characters that the overall weight and scope of the impending doom was lost.


Paetheon makes many crucial decisions and comes to some understandings that he never imagined. He takes his beloved Phoenix across the Solar System, sets some amazing traps, and even dives into the sun. We get some cool black hole theories, discussions on individuality, and the discoveries of layers of lies. All this sounds great, but nothing is given to us without first having a very long and drawn out conversation that spells out all the possible outcomes. I got tired…This book should have been the exciting action packed finale, and there was some of that, but it was all over shadowed by the endless blathering.


This is an incredible series, and I do not want my disappointment from this book to sway readers from this series. Books one and two are simply masterful. And as a whole series The Golden Age is a remarkable piece of hard science fiction. John C. Wright is a gifted writer who really knows how to build a futuristic world. I love the simple themes that make our story and our characters thee dimensional…




“Not so. There will always be men like you, my son, who will do the things no one else predicts or can control. I tried to tame the sun and failed; no one knows what is at its fiery heart; but you will tame a thousand suns, and spread mankind so wide in space that no one single chance, no flux of chaos, no unexpected misfortune, will ever have power enough to harm us all. For men to be civilized, they must be unlike each other, so that when chaos comes to claim them, no two will use what strategy the other does, and thus, even in the middle of blind chaos, some men, by sheer blind chance, if nothing else, will conquer.
" 'The way to conquer the chaos which underlies all the illusionary stable things in life, is to be so free, and tolerant, and so much in love with liberty, that chaos itself becomes our ally; we shall become what no one can foresee; and courage and inventiveness will be the names we call our fearless unpredictability....'"



I wish that things went differently as I truly loved the first two books. In the end this is an amazing series that I can easily give my highest recommendations to science fiction readers not afraid to put in some work…

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

John C. Wright's The Golden Transcendence, the third and final novel in his Golden Age trilogy, is so utterly awful that I have had to revise down by two stars my opinion of the previous books. What began as a beautifully-imagined and well-executed piece of speculative transhuman fiction, by the third novel has devolved precipitously into complete drivel.

At the beginning of the trilogy, the story's pretensions toward philosophical complexity could be ignored in light of its luxurious imagery and bewitching, kaleidoscopic narrative structure. These redeeming aspects fade to the background, however, and are soon replaced by a simple philosophical debate. And I do not mean that figuratively: by the third novel, the whole substance of the story has taken the form of an endless discussion between the characters on questions of abstract philosophy.

The real problem, though, is that the "philosophy" in question, while presented as complex and relevant in the characters' future world, is almost pre-modern in its lack of sophistication. This jarring inconsistency, taken together with narrative's collapse into expositional dialog among indistinguishable characters, overwhelms even the earlier novels' attractions and negates the entire trilogy as moot.

[Roddy Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Here at last is the dazzling conclusion of the masterpiece of far future space opera that began with ‘The Golden Age’ and continued in ‘The Phoenix Exultant’.

The time is imminent when all the minds of the solar system – human, post human, cybernetic, sophotechnic – will be temporarily merged into one supermind called The Transcendence. It is an awesome moment, but one when humanity will be helpless.

The mighty ship ‘Phoenix Exultant’ is at last in the hands of her master, Phaethon the Exile. He alone stands in the way of the eerie and deadly Lords of the Silent Oecumene, who seek to destroy the Inner System, man and machine alike, during this time of vulnerability. Phaeton (sic) dares to drive his ship into the heart of the Sun to stop them, but even that prodigious feat may not secure the human future.’

Blurb from the 2004 Tor paperback edition.

Wright brings his grand widescreen baroque vision to a triumphal end in the final part of this somewhat philosophical trilogy.
Phaethon, still exiled from the Golden Oecumene, finds himself on board his golden spaceship about, it would appear, to hand over control to the new owner, a mental combination of the Sophotech Xenophon and his friend Diomedes. Phaethon, again missing some of his memory, exposes the entity as an agent of the Silent Oecumene. The entity tries to convince Phaethon that his mission is a peaceful one and tells of the history of the lost colony of Cygnus X-1; how the Sophotechs, created with the limitless power of a black hole, took over the civilisation and eventually warred with each other. Humans still live, it would appear, but suspended within the event horizon of the black hole.
The entity is apparently defeated, but Phaethon, with the help of the resurrected Diomedes, his wife Daphne, his father Helion and Atkins, the embodiment of the perfect soldier, have to go to war against another Silent Oecumene agent, hiding in a ship beneath the chromosphere of the sun. The enemy, it is discovered, plans to attack during the Grand Transcendence, the millennial event when all the minds of the Golden Oecumene are linked together and at their most vulnerable.
At times wordy, complex, deeply philosophical and laced with a good ration of humour and in-jokes, this trilogy has to mark a milestone in the development of SF. Similar in style to the work of Wil McCarthy, Wright manages to hark back to the glory days of Alfred Bester and Charles L Harness while maintaining a cutting-edge grip on the Big Science aspects and orchestrating an enormous cast of Neo-Elizabethan grotesques in a baffling, complex and diverse interplanetary civilisation.

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow! What a disappointment! After two books which were both excellent, Wright concludes the trilogy not with a bang but a whimper. There was so much half-baked philosophy and crackpot science in here, it was almost impossible to finish. Almost no action - just characters having interminable dialogues with each other. No real plot twists, nothing of substance - just Wright trying to show how many historical, mythological and scientific references he can cram in.

I thought it was a little weak and talky from the getgo, but as it slogged on, the book became worse and worse. I finally lost all respect for it during the Transcedence. It seemed to just be Wright playing with words and concepts at that point. Very disappointing, and an unworthy conclusion to the two novels that went before it. I would avoid this book like the plague.

[Javier · Rating 2 out of 5]

El último libro de la trilogía tiene fama de ser el peor de los tres y quizá por eso, siguiendo una lógica inversa, me animé a leerlo tan rápido. Ya comenté que La edad de oro me había parecido una novela asequible tanto para el aficionado al género como para el lector más casual; en Fénix exultante , en cambio, asistimos a una degradación de los principales personajes y de la historia misma, que se convierte en una parodia de mal gusto. Siendo así, no sabía qué esperar de este capítulo, y lo que me he encontrado es que Wright se guardó todo el arsenal hard para el final, motivo por el cual, sin duda, La trascendencia dorada goza de menos popularidad entre el público que ha encumbrado la saga a un nivel injustificable. Este nuevo giro me ha hecho más ameno el desenlace, y al desparecer casi por completo las graves lacras que me llevaron a abandonar toda esperanza he podido cerrar con algo de satisfacción la lectura. Con todo, no recomendaría a nadie que perdiera su tiempo con estos tres tomos, cuyo éxito me resulta incomprensible (quizá tenga que ver con que tanto rollo filosófico, en apariencia de gran complejidad pero ulteriormente tan simple, funciona bien entre el público joven-adulto; en tal caso, opino que hay infinidad de obras mejores para abrir la mente). A pesar de algunas ideas interesantes y de un trasfondo sugerente y atractivo, me queda la sensación de que el autor abarca mucho más de lo que tiene capacidad para contar. En todos los aspectos —calidad literaria, construcción de personajes (hay momentos en los que Dafne es uno de los más tontos que he visto), desarrollo de la acción y equilibrio de los elementos de la trama—, La edad de oro presenta innumerables flaquezas y una inconsistencia global que la relegan, a mi juicio, a la categoría de lo anecdótico. Es una pena que un universo con tantas posibilidades quede desaprovechado de esta forma.

[Jay Goemmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Golden Transcendence (2003) by John C. Wright.

"This changes EVERYTHING... or does it?"

"Things are not as they seem." With that assertion seemingly in mind, John C. Wright plunges the reader into the final volume of his "Golden Age" trilogy. His flowery but captivating prose is back once again, which to editor David G. Hartwell's credit is fairly easy to lose spelling errors in. Half a dozen misspellings per book seem to be typical for this series, e.g., "Helion" is misspelled as "Heloin." But Wright's three-dimensional characters and the story's pacing kept me turning pages to the very end.

While cyberpunk novels were all the rage in 1990, they simply left me feeling... creepy. In direct contrast, Wright manages to keep the reader wondering what *else* his characters will have to go through, but ties up the loose ends and brings the "Golden Age" trilogy to an inspiring denouement on a note of hope -- which is a rare commodity in science fiction of late.

Despite a slight lag in Volume 2, "The Golden Age" trilogy is worth the investment to get to "The End"... which in itself proves to be "Just the Beginning" for its characters. A satisfying read, in the end.

(12 Dec 2005)

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Turns out More Wright isn't necessarily Better Wright.

But okay, let's take this once more from the top. Our hero Phaeton is the man everyone openly hates while secretly also wanting to be him. He's managed to tick off his semi-utopian society by insisting on building a giant spaceship to explore the stars, which is a big enough no-no that everyone got together after the ship was built and convinced him to forget that he ever built it and put a price on his remembering of essentially be exiled out of society. But you can't keep a man from his precious ship forever and so when he inevitably did remember he got kicked out of Rich People's Club and had to survive by his wits for a whole three hundred pages or so. While doing that (and supremely confidently, one might add) he also has to try and solve how he even got into this mess in the first place . . . convinced that his true enemy is a Sophotech (a class of AI that's sort of like if your smartphone ran your life more than it already does) he calls Nothing that appears to be a representative of the Silent Oecumene. THAT place is a far away colony that mysteriously went dark quite a while ago though not before releasing a series of unhinged messages coupled with some images that sound like Hieronymus Bosch tried to rip off HR Giger. Which begs the question, if the Silent Oecumene didn't actually eat itself, or whatever it did, what exactly do they want with Phaeton. Do they also want his magnificent ship? Doesn't everyone?

If the first book asked the question "Now what?" and the second book also asked the question "Now what?" you shouldn't be surprised by Wright sticking to what works and asking that question one more time, only this time without the crutch of "To be continued" to push off the actual resolution to yet another book. In the last book Phaeton hooked up with human Bjork song Atkins and his devoted not-wife Daphne to finally ascertain that Things Were About to Get Real, revealing that his exile wasn't as exilelicious as it appeared and giving us kind of an action scene where a horse turns into a chatty threatening Cthulu analogue and then gets blown up anyway.

Now its time for backs to be against the wall, for men of good will and stern honor to square their shoulders and prepare to . . . talk a lot.

Yes, as you can probably guess from this book being roughly twice as long as the proceeding volume Wright has not grown less fond of assuming that people are flocking to these books because they hear these characters talking in their heads and think "These sure sound like real, exciting people."

From the jump you're in trouble, wading through large blocks of text where Phaeton and someone who appears to be his nemesis engage in a battle of wits which mostly seems to involve trying to talk each other to death, two people attempting to out-clever each other while stuck on a spaceship (which should be the interesting part! and yet . . . its kind of just background) and only succeeding in managing not one memorable line between them. Then it’s a straight detour into Exposition City where we get to hear the other side of things, trying to shake up what we know.

Thing is . . . none of this feels like it matters. Wright, trying as he does, never makes this whole backdrop feel anything like a remotely functioning future so much as a series of interesting ideas about the future of humanity all stitched and cobbled together and debated endlessly amongst people whose only real purpose is to be vehicles for debating those ideas. If you find his take on things exciting then this will be hard science catnip to your starved brain . . . for everyone else its a struggle to recall even one interesting plot development happening in this book.

Part of the problem for me is despite reviews citing a huge cast the book continually feels like the universe only consists of maybe five people and none of those people are inherently fascinating, alone or all together. Phaeton still hogs most of the oxygen and despite everything his immense self-confidence and conviction never becomes endearing . . . once it becomes Ship Time he hits that note and just sings it until the book is over, which is an impressively sustained bit of opera but after a while just becomes a gentle background hum. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the series, Phaeton's "We must go to spaacceeee" braggadocio conflicting with the inherent stasis of the society he was born into resisting his outward impulses mostly falls by the wayside as it turns out that everyone important was secretly on his side anyway, they just weren't as bold as he was and unable to speak their mind. Its this repeated need to have characters essentially express "Phaeton, YOU were the great man we needed all along!" kind of makes the series tip its hand and show its in the tank for him from the getgo. But its not that the series ever really proves that Phaeton is right, after a certain point its just taken as a given and everyone else just falls by the wayside in the face of him being unswervingly right all the time. I'm not saying the book needs to be actively undermining its own protagonist but it'd be nice if it tried to poke a few holes in its own certainty every so often.

But boy, that isn't what we're here for. Our other big main character, Daphne, uses her additional page count to hammer home that her and Phaeton are meant to be together, as opposed to his actual wife (who chose to go into a coma to avoid being around him . . . that's not a huge exaggeration) so she mostly alternates between a sort of coy flirtiness and "stand by your man" bravado disguised as trying to take him down a peg. But, oh you know, he was always the only man for her. This winds up making her vastly less interesting than the version we got in the first two volumes (who was at least conflicted and had a point of view), something that only gets worse when Phaeton gets on the same page as her and we're treated to epic universe-cracking love (in Wright's defense, she's not his worst female character . . . the one girl in his "Everness" series takes the prize and all the runner-up awards to boot) that doesn't improve anything except replace a somewhat interesting conundrum ("Can I love an exact copy of my wife?") with "Do I love you a bunch or a whole bunch of bunches?" which is not quite a even exchange.

At times it’s a really weird book because its clear that Wright is taking all of this very seriously (it comes up several times where the characters you're supposed to agree with insist that morality isn't relative, implying there's a universal right and wrong . . . this happens often enough that its clearly on his mind) but at same time acting outwardly like he's having fun with it even as it feels like someone's dad swaggering into his son's room where his friends are hanging out determined to give a lesson "in the rapping manner of the hip-hop, yo" . . . i.e. its not fun at all, never feeling at all loose and relaxed but tightly scripted and just . . . rigid. The jokes all feel made through clenched teeth or flung into a chorus of mechanical "ha ha ha"'s. It seems to me that Wright is trying to consciously evoke both Golden Age SF and specifically the confident pluck of a Heinlein character (or the main hero in Doc Smith's "Lensmen" series) but retooled for the modern day. But despite his ambitions Wright's leaden prose buries it under waves of Making Sure You Get the Point and completely charmless characters.

Instead its just thudding, thudding text no matter which page I randomly open the book to hoping to find some scene that will stir my memory. But because everything is so decidedly "eh" when the revelations do come they hit all with the impact of undercooked Jello . . . everything is so dependent on how much you buy into Phaeton being The Man that if his appeal in lost on you then the book itself will barely register because so much of what matters is wrapped up in him. Its not just his personal glory but if he succeeds everyone succeeds everywhere forever, or at least that's how it seems. The book wants to be deep and philosophical, a story where the concepts are the star but its so often clear which side the book is on that its hardly a debate at all, merely Wright setting up the pieces so that his ideas always magically seem to come out ahead. Perhaps to him it makes the most sense that way, that he puzzled through it all rationally and it just happened to pull together in a way that aligned with how the world should operate in his eyes but there's no sizzle to it, no feeling of real stakes. Ultimately you're just waiting for the book to tell you how you should be thinking.

The book further hamstrings itself by giving us what passes for a climax about a hundred pages too early before diving into the Transcendence, a pages and pages long event that's supposed to be uplifting and perhaps a fusion of all the themes the series has been laying out all along but instead feels like an endless epilogue where the plot had halted entirely. Maybe in a perfect version of this novel the climax would have created a burst of good vibes that you would have rode all the way through this elongated finale but its just a flood of characters with weird names that I'm unfamiliar with and a bunch of resolutions that carry zero emotional weight whatsoever. Did some live, did some die? I guess. I'm not sure it makes any difference.

I wanted to like this series, even if my first experience with Wright was, shall we say, sub-par (and at times its difficult to separate the merits or lack thereof of his novels from his pompously self-important and often odious online musings, which gives you the squirming sensation that the themes underlying his stories come from a not-great place, or at least I don't think he's someone I'd ever get along with personally, in fact quite the opposite). He definitely has a better head for SF and a brain full of ideas but the ideas just seem to exist as a carrier for his worldview which at this stage in his career he isn't able to express in a manner that provokes any sort of reaction at all. Whether I agree or disagree with it almost seems irrelevant, nothing about what he's putting forward gives me a compelling reason to form a concrete opinion about it. Even Heinlein at his most boundary pushing was rarely boring (and the boring ones are the worst ones) and despite it being not much fun to be repulsed by a book, at least it’s a feeling you can dissect. Here, I don't care one way or the other. Not in the first book and not now. I've rarely run into a book that steadfastly refuses to give me anything to latch onto beyond "Wow, everyone talks too much" or "The series sure thinks Phaeton is cool." Its disappointing, really, the gap between what the series is promising and what you actually encounter. Not the thoughtful discourse of ideas he so desperately wants it to be, not a guilty pleasure, heck, its not even worth a hate-read (for those who find his politics intensely disagreeable, and boy are they) its just a bunch of pages put together by someone convinced they have Something to Say and we all need to hear it but in the end its not even just noise, its that vague hiss in the speakers that comes when you're waiting for a song to actually start.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the eve of the Transcendence, our hero Phaethon is finally where all strands of destiny have always led him: aboard his magnificent starship, the Phoenix Exultant.

The book starts in high gear and never lets up with Phaethon matching wits and philosophy against his enemy, the Nothing Sophotech, agent of the Silent Oecumene. Can he stop the Nothing from sabotaging the Transcendence and triumphing over the Golden Oecumene? It's an all-out philosophical war on the bridge of the Phoenix Exultant pitting the values of the Silent Oecumene against those of the Golden Oecumene. And the stakes are ultimately revealed to be high: nothing less than the fate of life at the very end of time and the universe.

This is my favorite book in the trilogy. The overwhelming terminology used in the first book is now familiar and you can enjoy all the nuances of the complex society Wright envisions. Phaethon is still the great mythic hero, but we finally get to see Daphne, Helion, and Atkins fleshed out as characters. In general, supporting characters are ill-defined and indistinguishable as individuals in the trilogy, so this is a nice treat. The philosophy is first rate, if extremely convoluted. I had to read a few bits over again to sort out all the knots. Every time a Sophotech spoke, it was just sheer deliciousness!

In summary, this trilogy showcases some extremely interesting and mind-bending concepts in a "space opera meets Greek myth" frame, delivered via philosophical debate in delectable technobabble.

[Keso Shengelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final book in Wright's Golden Age Trilogy does not disappoint

[Rainb0warri0r · Rating 4 out of 5]

"L'universo è sempre più grande delle menti in esso contenute."

Episodio finale della trilogia dell'Ecumene dorato, un po' sottotono rispetto ai primi due romanzi, ma ne mantiene le promesse.
Tutti i nodi vengono al pettine: i nemici si rivelano, mentre Phaeton ritrova se stesso, il padre, e la moglie. Dal punto di vista della crescita del personaggio, Wright non delude: Phaeton, il cui nome rivela la derivazione classica del personaggio, è un grande personaggio tragico, ambizioso, votato alla hybris, costretto sempre a dover operare delle sofferte scelte morali. Tra queste, l'accettazione di Daphne Tercius, la versione di sé modificata che la moglie ha scelto per Phaeton, incapace di ricambiare pienamente il suo amore. Bellissimo è il capitolo in cui Phaeton finalmente si rende conto dei suoi sentimenti, e l'autore mostra tutta la sua grandissima capacità di caratterizzare il protagonista, una capacità pari alla sua esorbitante immaginazione.
Ottima anche la realizzazione del contesto, con tutte le considerazioni di carattere socio-politico: la guerra tra l'Ecumene Dorato e l'Ecumene Silenzioso è la lotta tra l'utopia e la distopia, ed entrambe sono destinate a fallire. Così come destinata a chiudersi è l'Età dell'oro, dando avvio ad un'età di guerra e conflitti, ma anche di esplorazione dello spazio ed innovazione, una vera e propria Età degli Eroi, per continuare l'analogia con la Grecia classica.
L'entusiasmo, tuttavia, cala notevolmente per la narrazione. Purtroppo è proprio in questo campo che Wright perde qualche colpo. Innanzitutto risulta soffocante una narrazione di eventi confinata in uno spazio chiuso quale la Phoenix, l'astronave di Phaeton. Nonostante un avvio denso di azione, rimane per tutto il romanzo la sensazione di una esasperante lentezza. C'è poi troppa confusione, ed è inevitabile, vista la particolare scelta dell'autore di puntare su una lotta meramente psicologica e verbale, con un'infinita sequenza di dialoghi che riscrivono continuamente la verità, al punto che ben presto il lettore ci si perde e smette di credere a qualunque cosa. Il tutto, infine, risulta sotto tono, specie nel confronto con il primo romanzo, molto più ricco e visionario.
Rimane comunque la degna conclusione di una trilogia fantascientifica estremamente ricca, lucidissima nelle sue mirabolanti visioni.

[Howardstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before leaving a review I'm just gonna re-read the entire trilogy, I love the story, the nostalgia, and with it being so complex I have to come at it a second time to grasp everything as a whole, not just in parts and steps, which would also make for a better review. Part of the reason why I want to re-read the entire trilogy is the same reason that I gave this book a 4.5. it's because... (Grips, please do not read from this point on)

[Take all this lightly, I am much wiser the second time around, and don't even consider this as a review. I intend to write pages and pages on this trilogy after I re-read it.]

***SPOILERS***


the ending did not leave the characters doing something different than they had started out doing; to put it another way, the antagonists did not make much of an impression on the protagonists. Their philosophy was not changed and they hardly learned anything. A new horizon was not opened, despite the very strong conceptual buildup to one: the antagonists expounded their philosophy at 3 major points and there was not much of an intellectual defeat of the philosophy (but maybe I have to reanalyze it, so the score out of 5 is tentative). Also, there was no sense of "the bad guys were right about at least one thing all along" or "those who we thought were helping us are actually hurting us", despite the strong conceptual buildup to it made during the 3 major points with the antagonists expounding their ideas. [Antagonist speaking] "We're not so different, you and I" cliche was used very well, but its potential for changing the reader's mind about something he took for granted was squandered by the defeat of the antagonist.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final book in Wright's Golden Age Trilogy does not disappoint. Definitely don't read this before reading the first two books (Golden Age and the Phoenix Exultant). It starts off with an insanely intense battle and then shoots for the sun - literally! It does slow down for a bit, but then takes off quite energetically again.

This is the climactic book in an amazing trilogy, and Wright does an excellent job of bringing together all the different links and elements which he began weaving in the first two books. What is most satisfactory about this, in my mind, is that you are never completely sure exactly where things are going. There are so many twists and turns in the plot, but not so many or so often that you begin to get lost in it.

In my mind, The Golden Transcendence, along with Golden Age and Phoenix Exultant, are supreme examples of science fiction at it's best. It's hard to compare what Wright has written with Asimov's fiction, because he (Wright) really is going in a different direction creatively. Nonetheless, I highly recommend it to all fans of the genre.

That said, I might not recommend this as the first science fiction book you read. Some of Wright's concepts are so "out there" that someone not used to science fiction might get a little lost. However, if you're up to a dive off the creative deep end into an incredible story wrapped around characters of immense depth in a truly visionary society - don't hesitate! Snatch up copies of all three books and just dive in.

[Joel Salomon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review applies to all three books of John C. Wright’s brilliant space opera The Golden Oecumene: The Golden Age , The Phoenix Exultant , and The Golden Transcendence: or, The Last of the Masquerade .
  His vision is of of a far future, where immortal men are free to live in a benign Matrix-like dreamworld, or the real world, or anything in between; but where one man dares to dream of “deeds of renown without peer”: to expand humanity’s reach beyond our solar system (and one horribly failed colonization attempt of Cygnus X-1) into the rest of the galaxy.
  There’s some beautiful imagery and poetic language—and some laugh-out-loud wry humor:

  She smiled to see a silver throne had been grown next to his gold one, draped in her heraldic colors. “What are we supposed to be? Jupiter and Juno?”
  He said, “Actually, Vulcan and Venus might be more apt.”
  “I thought he was lame.”
  “You must recall my sense of humor. That should count.”

Highly recommended.

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1095705.html[return][return]Sorry, but I've got a hundred pages into it and I'm giving up. The unlikeable protagonist is locked in mental battle with his adversary using various nanotech and other superpowers, and I suddenly realised I didn't really care which of them won (indeed, as Ian Hislop said about the Mohamed al-Fayed vs Neil Hamilton libel case, I almost wished they would both lose).

[Terry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kind of unfair to rate this one since I never got past the first few chapters. It seems that the disappointment from the second book was destined to follow me into the third. I just didn't really care much anymore what Phaeton was doing or why. Things started to seem a little contrived and ultimately not worth the effort.

Maybe I'll go back to this one someday and try to finish off the series, maybe it gets better after the point where I dropped off.

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Florid fantasy wrapped in a thin tissue of offensively bad science fiction. I gave up about 1/3rd through.

Pros: fulfilled author's contractual obligation, thus supporting the economic structure which helped him write the first book in the series (yay!)

Cons: utter trainwreck

Apart from the various literary flaws, the science fiction, never Wright's strong point, breaks down completely in this book. Implausible, inconsistent, and just plain bad. My brain exploded.

[Juniper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somewhere in the 2nd book this series fell flat. The scifi was mostly pushed aside for overly verbose and meaningless philosophy. Run on sentences containing 100 words and 25 commas are littered throughout sections of bad science in an attempt to keep the epic nature of the first book alive. In the end we get treated to old cliches of 'Man is not complete/able to overcome without a woman' and the weaponized logic bomb.

[Richard · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's too bad I couldn't award a -1 star to this book.

Poor editing. Extreme overuse of descriptive imagery and philosophic narratives. Complex plot line with numerous discontinuities. The author ties up loose ends at the end, but does so using extremely convoluted knots. This book, like its two predescessors in the trilogy, was a very tedious read.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pace improved dramatically after Book 2. The Golden Transcendence continued to raise philosophical questions touching on the meanings of self and rationality, building off of those in the Golden Age. Not wholly satisfied with the ending (would have loved to see the book reach an ultimate conclusion to history), but I am by no means unsatisfied.

[Jose Solis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buena conclusión de la serie que comenzó con The Golden Age y The Phoenix Exultant. Habiendo recuperado su fabulosa nave, ahora Phaeton se enfrenta a la Oecumene oscura para defender el futuro de la humanidad. El libro individual no alcanza las alturas del primero, pero en conjunto, la historia es muy buena. Es un excelente ejemplo de la moderna space-opera.

[Cupof Tea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series improved as it went on, and the dramatic ending gripped me throughout this final book. A battle of wits, logic, and philosophy under the surface of the sun involving an unreasoning computer mind from inside a miniature black hole. Ridiculous and overly dramatic and very entertaining.

[Jorge L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un cierre digno¡¡
Este último libro de la trilogía de la Edad de Oro cumple con su objetivo, dar un final a la altura, responder dudas, cerrar arcos y sobretodo entrega un apéndice que tanto necesitaba ¡¡¡
En serio el apendice de esste libro me da ganas de aprender más sobre los diversas etapas de la estructura mental cada etapa puede ser una saga completa, historias por contar en contextos tan ingeniosos e intrigantes.
El universo construido por el autor es coherente consigo mismo lo que permite una mayor inmersión en la historia, siempre y cuando uno se tome el tiempo de entenderlo, talvez sea una obra de ficción un poco "pesada" con todas las definiciones y teoricas expuestas, pero ahi está la gracia y el placer de desentrañar la lógica en un universo tan rico como el expuesto.
Sin duda se ha convertido en uno de mis libros favoritos, sin embargo creo que no supera a mi #1 (Hyperion). Ambos libros tienen historias impresionantes, especulativas pero coherentes, sin embargo creo que Hyperion es ligeramente mejor para mi por su diversificación y profundidad en la historia de los personajes, cada uno tiene un arco impresionante en el primer libro lo cual lo hace que ames más a su tripulación.
Aun así la Edad de Oro es una joya de la ciencia ficción que todo amante del genero debería al menos dar una oportunidad, se me olvidaba, tiene las frases que más he amado y describen particularmente mis principios personales...mención especial para los discursos de Faetón y Helión, soy más como el segundo asi que espero mi hij@ sea como el primero.

[Eros Fratini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Volume finale del ciclo dell'"Età dell'Oro": un affresco del futuro assurdamente complesso e ambizioso.
In quest'ultimo romanzo il protagonista è sempre Phaethon, che deve ancora districarsi dalle maglie del complotto ordito ai suoi danni e riottenere la Phoenix.
Quest'ultimo volume mi ha convinto decisamente meno dei precedenti: se andiamo a stringere ci sono in totale 4 o 5 scene in tutto il libro, ma l'autore riesce a stirarle all'inverosimile, con dialoghi prolissi, descrizioni interminabili, flashback e quant'altro.
Inoltre, come già commentato per i precedenti romanzi, la tecnologia e la struttura socio/politica dell'Ecumene sono assurdamente complesse e stare dietro a tutti i dettagli, tutte le menti collettive, le neuroforme, i parziali, le scuole di pensiero, ecc... è molto pesante.
Utilissima per questo l'appendice finale! Se solo fosse stata all'inizio del primo libro invece che alla fine dell'ultimo, avrebbe reso un po' più chiaro il contesto...
Nel complesso non è male, ma mi sarei aspettato un finale un po' meno cerebrale e un po' più scoppiettante.

[KevinS · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing ending to an otherwise excellent trilogy. I really enjoyed the setup and the development of the plot in the first two books, but this third book largely left me cold. I read these because I love Ian M Banks' Culture novels, and these are similar in a lot of respects. But unlike any of Banks' works, this one distracted me to boredom, I stopped paying rigorous attention to every word and sentence, and suddenly the text stopped making a lot of sense - the multiple timelines and individual timeline aspects surprised me and didn't really integrate with what I thought was going on. I didn't get the grand crescendo I wanted and deserved after hundreds and hundreds of pages of investment. I'm glad I finished the trilogy but John C Wright you owe us a better conclusion.

[Santiago L. Moreno · Rating 1 out of 5]

Discurso, discurso, discurso y poco más. Sí hay conceptos de cf y tropos transhumanistas interesantes en la conclusión, pero quedan enterrados bajo el sermón. Todo está al servicio de la exposición de ideas, en el extremo opuesto de lo que conformaba la primera novela, en mi opinión una de las mayores que ha dado este siglo. La trilogía acaba siendo como una clase dada por un profesor a sus alumnos que atrapa su atención con el relato de un escenario fascinante para, finalmente, colarles una lección de ideología y filosofía a destajo. Como dice cierto personaje burtoniano en una de sus películas, "inesperado giro de los acontecimientos". Tendrá su público, sin duda, pero no es mi caso.

[Robert Nolin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fifty pages from the end of this trilogy, I realized I really did not care what happened anymore. Not in the least. I read these books when they came out, and I remember being impressed with them. The first book was decent, but the second was pretty dull. The third, as others here have noted, is not a novel, per se. It's a philosophical discussion, and it's about as exciting as you would expect.

The series seems to be SF for the Ayn Rand crowd. It's "Atlas Shrugged" in space. Will avoid John C. Wright like the plague from here on out.

[Boris Budeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended but difficult to read and imagine (at least for me with English as secondary language). Wild concepts and very vivid and fantastic imagination. A quite complex story that can get lost between all the names and abstract functions and persoanlities. It's hard to understand who is human, an avatar, an AI or whatever exists in this future. And whether that actually makes any difference or not. I would love to read this book in German but it seems no one is willing to translate and publish it.