Microreview: Noumenon Ultra by Marina J Lostetter

An ambitious epic space opera series comes to a conclusion in its third and final volume.

It's been quite an adventure across the first two volumes of the Noumenon saga. The discovery of subdimensions allowing space travel capable of reaching the stars has led humanity to great and sometimes tragic discoveries. The convoys have found alien megastructures, incomplete and waiting to be finished, as well as accidents of time and space sending members of convoys into the distant future, discovering the descendants of Homo Sapiens.

In Noumenon Ultra, the third and final book of the trilogy, Marina Lostetter works toward an overall capstone to the saga that started in Noumenon and continued in Noumenon Infinity,

I mentioned in my review of Noumenon Infinity that one of the criticisms I had in trying to present this large space opera trilogy, for me anyway as a reader, is persistent main characters. The connective tissue between this book and the second, and the books in general, I see now, rely very much less on characters than the grand scope of her ideas.

Don't mistake, there is connective tissue in the form of C (or ICC), the sentient computer that has been present in all of the books and has acted as a sort of facilitator and guide for a number of characters and even entire convoys across the books. There is a real accidentally to ICC and their existence and persistence which seems to populate this book. This book, this series,  has a lot of messy "for want of a nail" events that mirror real history. The cloning of Jamal Braeden, for example, successfully, does tie back to the original novel and does give us a tie to the first novel, and yet the people responsible for cloning him could not predict that one of the clones would eventually decide to break free of the dogma and ritual and structure that has been accreted around him. 

And then there is Vanhi Kapoor. I slept on her and her story a bit in the second volume, but here, in the third volume, I can see that she is one of the keystone characters. She is one of the soi-disant "immortals", one of a select few in the book, but her case is different than the clone lines, or ICC or anyone else because of her being a bit unstuck in time and skipping ahead thanks to her tangled relationship with a particular subdimension. Lostetter reveals in this volume that Vahni's relationship with the subdimension, is in fact, a slowly but surely degenerating one and that Vanhi, cannot, in fact, continue to fly toward the future forever. This does help drive her to participate in, and work with the main thrust and plot of the novel.

So once you have had a novel where convoys find alien megastructures and try and deal with their legacy and history, and also have a convoy that winds up going to the far future and discovering the descendants of humanity, where does go with the capstone of a series with such big and broad ideas like this? Lostetter decides to reach for a Stapledonian, or in a more modern guise and mode, a Baxterian solution. The purpose and the ultimate aims of the megastructures (since by this point there are several in various states of completion and activation) is revealed. There is life, sentience, beings in other universes, in the subdimensions, as opposed to the relative paucity of intelligent life in our own cosmos. The Noumenon project, then, is ultimately revealed to be a eons long project from the Pentatheem (the species that began the megastructures) to create the capability to not only have beings from these subdimensions visit our own, but most crucially, have the ability to visit them.

The devil of course is in the details. Lostetter draws together everyone, more or less, at the created planet Noumenon in an effort to understand each other, and what is going on, and to solve the enormous problems and challenges of the projects. We get threats to the fabric of space time itself, several first contacts, the revelation that the Pentatheem are not quite as extinct as first thought. Even after billions of years, they have, in a vastly different form, managed to survive. And then there is the very weird "wheeled form" of the species that in a scant few tens of thousands of years of ICC sleep, managed to evolve to sentience on the newly formed planet. To say nothing of the three kinds of humanity, the original and its two descendant branches. 

All of these species, and characters from each, eventually come together during the long and epic journey of the book. From infiltration escapades and escapes, to soaring above the landscape of the planet, the novel does try to reinterpret, reiterate and bring the themes of the first two novels to a conclusion. The nature of humanity (the conflicts and concerns between the original homo sapiens and the Lhung really emphasize that). Sentience. The potentials and dangers of large amounts of power, temporal and physical. The sometimes chaotic nature of history and the "founder effect" leading to very strange results down the line. And much more.

And the novel ends on a grace note for Vanhi, which, given all that she has been through since the first novel, I did appreciate. Too often such details get lost in the walls of words of a large epic like this. Lostetter has done an admirable and worthy job in trying to keep it all tied up, all together. 

I admit, as a reviewer, and as a reader, I want to ponder the relative lack of attention that the Noumenon series has received as opposed to some of the more usual suspects. It is true that really big widescreen space opera epics of this scope are not the fashion and trend these days. These days, what I like to call "Solar System Space Opera" - Expanse type stuff (even if it doesn't take place in Earth's own solar system) is far more common and always has been. The Gregory Benford, the Stephen Baxter, the Olaf Stapledonian sort of space opera and widescreen epic across the entire galaxy and enormous spans of time is pretty rare and pretty niche. And yet Baxter, and Benford, and Banks, and Bear are well known within the SF genre.

But for Marina Lostetter's Noumenon, I've seen far less coverage, play and interest. This might be as simple as the problem of women writing SF, especially hard SF, getting coverage, interest and readers eyeballs. There is a commitment, learning curve and opportunity cost to deciding to not buy the latest Stephen Baxter and instead picking up Noumenon and giving Lostetter and her brand of big epic SF a try. For reviewers in my stratum, it's often less a matter of the cost of the book and just the time and effort to try and engage with it, rather than falling on more familiar and established (read: male) authors, especially when the Noumenon books are each 500 pages or more. I get that.  And this can also apply to Essa Hansen's Nophek Gloss series. Wildly ambitious big screen (multiverse!) space opera that hits different notes than this one, but again, it's a commitment to try Hansen, just like it is a commitment just to try Lostetter.

And so I am here to tell you that if you want the big widescreen space opera on the grandest of scales, with long timeframes, lots of characters, big ideas, strong reflections on lots of weighty topics, and wild ambition that the novels do not always utterly achieve (because at these scales, no write quite ever can) but hit pretty well, then this (as well as Hansen's work) are the series you want.  I see that Lostetter has subsequently moved onto fantasy, but I do hope that she will return to SFF one day. I can kind of see how and why she might not want to for a while, given this series. This is the kind of series where you can "say everything" you want, just given the breadth of the work and the many things that are going on. I didn't even touch on the topics of motherhood, cloning, immigration and acceptance of others, xenophobia, and many others. 

So. The next time you are tempted to reach for the biggest of widescreen space operas, I urge you to give Marina Lostetter's Noumenon series a try. I think you will be glad you did. 

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Highlights:

• The widest of big screen space opera settings temporally and physically
• Closes out some long running plots of the series with verve
• The grace note at the very end brought a tear to my eye.

Reference: Lostetter, Marina, Noumenon Ultra, [Harper Voyager, 2020]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Microreview: Noumenon Infinity by Marina Lostetter

Marina Lostetter’s ambitious epic space opera series continues into its second volume.

In the original book Noumenon, we were introduced to a relatively near future humanity who had united behind common cause and possibility.  Interstellar travel was now possible, a relatively slow faster than light travel, but still worthwhile and practical, and hints that more research into the extra dimensions of space could improve it even more. Noumenon itself tells the story of one of the “convoys” of ships sent out to explore the local region of space, a wide ranging epic covering centuries of travel and using an AI as the viewpoint character to keep the narrative of the different time periods and characters together. That novel was a “there and back again” narrative, with the convoy reaching the mysterious and strange artifact known as The Web, and the hazards and tribulations the convoy faced when it came home. With notes of Kim Stanley Robinson and others, Noumenon was a highly ambitious work.

Noumenon Infinity continues that ambition and story. 

Noumenon Infinity continues the tradition of the first novel in having decades, even centuries pass between inflection points, important points in the narrative and story of the two convoys it follows. Unlike the first novel, this novel follows Convoy 7, the convoy that went to the web in the first novel, and also the new Convoy 12. Convoy 12’s mission seems to be a sideshow at first, just going out to the Oort cloud, not even a light year away, and do research on the subdimensions that make interstellar travel, to improve our understanding of it, theoretically and possibly practically.  Needless to say, things do not go according to plan for Convoy 12, and they wind up making the greatest journey of all the convoys in the process.

The original book leaned heavily on the AI as a throughline character to keep things going along and to have a narrative thread for the story. Here, C exists and has agency as a character in Convoy 7 (Convoy 12 does not have C, which turns out to be a real lack when things go sidewise for them). But even on Convoy 7, C takes a back seat, and there are aspects to the flow of how Convoy 7 goes that continues to make C a secondary character.

Instead, Lostetter relies heavily for Convoy 7 to use clonal descendant lines of characters to provide the narrative connective tissue between the set pieces as the Convoy returns to the web and learns its secrets of who built it, who altered it, and what happened to both. There is also a neat bit of character development when a character starts hearing voices...or does he? What starts off as appearing some sort of mental illness turns out to be much more, and becomes plot significant as well. But I am not sure that it works quite as well as having a persistent character as the first novel does. Convoy 12 has no such issues, and we follow the same set of characters that we start with. The contrast between the two convoys is rather stark, I am afraid.

But it is the ideas, the big ideas that really carry this novel and what I want to talk about. The first novel was about the long journey to a big dumb object and the challenges and strictures of making that journey, and then finding, when you returned home, that you really can’t go home again, not only because you have changed, but so has *home*.  

That sort of disconnection from home, that dislocation is a theme that runs through Noumemon Infinity, both on Convoy 7 and on Convoy 12. There are other questions in line, but the nature of home, and what happens when you are estranged from that, or from the people in our home is one of the abiding ideas that haunts both of the convoys as we follow their trials and travails. In keeping with that, the stories of both convoys really dive into the nature of humanity, the nature of the other, the nature of the alien, and how can we determine and really know what that other, what that alien is, and how we can engage with it. 

I found many notes and touchstones in this book.  The problems of generation ships are less in the forefront here than in the first novel, where really, that WAS the point, Kim Stanley Robinson Aurora style. Here, I got notes of Gregory Benford, with the quest to understand older galactic civilizations (there is a lot of theorizing and hypothesizing over remnants of alien civilizations and what that all means), of Greg Bear and his Forge of God series, of Alastair Reynolds, and even episodes of Doctor Who. There is a rich conversation the novel is having with a variety of works, and this is the sort of ambitious science fiction that rewards, one might even say is focused on readers who have read deeply and widely in the genre, so as to have already engaged with some of these ideas and seeing where Lostetter’s work fits in that genre conversation. 

And that comes to my last point...who this book and series is for. I do not think, in my view, that this is science fiction that is aimed at readers new to the genre. It’s long, deep, rich and engages with some of the more interesting core ideas and concepts of science fiction,with a wide canvas of time and space between the two convoys it follows. It is a book that engages with its predecessors and, especially for a middle book in a series, comes up with a more than satisfactory narrative. There are definite questions left in the narrative as to what is going on and why (on a galactic scale) and what the future of humanity will be. I look forward to tackling the third book in the series and seeing how Lostetter wrapped up her ambitious trilogy.

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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for wild ambition in telling a widescreen space opera, not only in space but also in time.

Penalties: -1  the lack of a central persistent character in one of the two convoys (as opposed to the first book) is a narrative disadvantage.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Lostetter, Marina, Noumenon Infinity [Harper Voyager, 2020]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.