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Metaplanetary

Metaplanetary is a bait-and-switch novel: After over 400 pages of reading, it turns out to be the beginning of a longer story, as almost nothing is resolved in this book. Indeed, the book as a whole feels like little more than an overlong prologue.

Even worse, I'd stopped caring about the book even a little somewhere around page 300.

This "novel of interplanetary civil war" takes place a thousand years in the future, where the solar system has been colonized fairly thoroughly by humanity. The Mercury/Venus/Earth/Mars orbital zones have been linked using physical high-strength cables for communication and travel, and this structure and its political entity is called "The Met". The space and planets beyond the asteroid belt are haphazardly organized. Met Director Amés wants to change this, as he launches a war against the outer system, and also starts to bring the Met under martial law.

Daniel throws a variety of scientifictional ideas into the book: Living spaceships; "Large Arrays of Personalities" (LAPs), who are one complex consciousness with multiple bodies; "grist", which is a sort of advanced nanotech which affects both reality and cyberspace; and "free converts", who are basically sentient computer algorithms.

Daniel also creates a large set of characters, some being oppressed by Amés, others opposing him in the Met or in the outer system.

It's all for naught, though, as there's not really much of interest here. The characters are almost all flat as a board, a few of them having a smidgen of characterization through being flamboyant or determined or insane. But the narrative is kept firmly in a distant third person tone so we never warm to any of the characters, or learn how they really feel. Daniel takes a stab at telling us about them by often providing extensive (and tedious) back stories for them, but this only tells us about them, it doesn't let us know them. It's as if Daniel is painting a picture by numbers.

The fantastic elements are also pretty pedestrian. Powerful sentient ships are Iain Banks' stock-in-trade. Free converts are an old idea under a new name. LAPs get only a little bit of screen time, and grist feels just like nanotech with a new handle. The only innovation here (to me) is the Met, which seems comical and implausible. While reading about the Met I kept thinking, "Why is Met travel better than using ships? Why is Met communication better than using the wireless communication that the outer planets have? What does the structure of the Met buy anyone?"

Daniel also has this lighthearted Neal Stephenson narrative style, which I find doesn't work for me at all (and didn't when Stephenson applied it, either). Your mileage may vary, but the book started losing me in the prologue because of this.

Metaplanetary might have been a thrilling and novel story back in the 1950s, but it feels ho-hum today. And then it ends abruptly, leaving several characters' stories hanging, presumably with a sequel to extend and eventually finish the yarn.

I'm not fooled, though. There's nothing in the world of Metaplanetary which has me even the slightest bit curious as to what happens next. And I suggest you give it a pass, too.