Russell Letson Reviews Blade by Linda Nagata

Blade, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island Press 978-193719-744-5, $7.99, 308pp, eb) March 2024. Cover by Sarah Anne Layton

Subtract the mystery/thriller-family elements and most of the same tropes and devices enable Linda Nagata’s Blade, the fourth entry in her Inverted Frontier sequence, itself a continuation of the Nanotech Succession series. The frontier in question is inverted because the story line reverses the outward-bound pattern of much in­terstellar adventure by sending its explorers from the fringes of human expansion back toward its historical, physical, and now perhaps empty cen­ter. Millennia earlier, widespread settled systems were annihilated by internal artificially-generated psychosocial disorders or wandering, autonomous Chenzeme warcraft (leftovers from an even more ancient galactic war), and now a crew of posthu­man explorers have taken a captured and tamed Chenzeme courser craft, rechristened Dragon, in search of answers: What caused the fall of the Hallowed Vasties, the solar-system-engulfing constructions that once dominated human-settled star systems? Might there be survivors?

The first three books, Edges, Silver, and Needle revealed not so much survivors as successors, in the form of the ringworld Verilotus, created by what might be called post-posthumans: once-human entities whose uplifted nature and pow­ers amount to something like godhood. Part of their creative and destructive powers depends on the ‘‘silver’’ (introduced in Memory, a bridge volume between the Nanotech Succession and Inverted Frontier segments), perhaps a kind of super-nanotech, but also a near-magical substrate for matter and minds and a key to all manner of transformation and to the creation of worlds or weapons. At the end of Silver, having battled the rogue-godlike Lizuri, the expedition’s leader, Ur­ban, has taken the silver into his body and mind and now determines to use its powers to shape a Blade, the more-than-tool that can build a world out of apparent nothing. But a Blade can also destroy, which is why Urban’s closest companions are wary of his ambition.

Now Dragon detects tempting signs in several star systems, and it approaches one, Hupo Sei, that shows ‘‘glints and hints of what might be lacy little orbital structures.’’ But in that vicinity they also detect what proves to be an ancient human ‘‘great ship’’ and the computationally-preserved personality of its pilot, Tio Suthrom, along with his nonhuman companion, a hive machine intel­ligence called Ashok. Ashok, in turn, is a splinter of a larger collection of its kind, all originally created by an organic species long ago threatened by Chenzeme destruction and dispatched with the purpose of establishing a new, safe haven for survivors (if any), though the task might take ‘‘half a billion years at least.’’

Tio Suthrom and Ashok and the rest of the Inventions are not the only intelligences en­countered, and much of the book is occupied by understanding and negotiating with them, along with arguments about the general prudence and ethics of dealing with various kinds of thinking beings – not only those at Hupo Sei but those aboard Dragon: the tamed (or subverted or evolved) Chenzeme ‘‘philosopher cells’’ that make up the mind of the courser, and the apparatchiks, specialized computer-bound personalities spun off from the Dragoneers’ own minds, but locked against becoming fully autonomous, independent, and embodied beings. Until some of them manage to do just that.

Every encounter with outsiders and Others expands the kinds and degrees of collaboration, competition, and decision-making depicted in the novel: the consensus sought by the crew of Dragon (threatened by Urban’s ambitions); the debates among the philosopher cells that are the courser’s mind; the factions within the multiplex hive personalities that constitute the Inventions; the doubts and fears of Tio Suthrom, who sees humankind as ‘‘a territorial species more deadly, more destructive than the marauders ever were.’’

Once relations and arrangements with various new entities are settled (not without a certain amount of disorder and violence and uncertainty), Urban’s most ambitious project can proceed: to construct a Blade and with it to make a world for the Inventions, not in millions of years but all at once. And the cost of that dangerous ef­fort is followed by transformations that reshape relationships across and within species lines and reconfigure the plans of the Dragon and the Inventions alike.

The novels since Memory sometimes read like fantasy reinforced by science-fictional-materialist explanations of magical events and powers – the silver in particular might as well be a supernatural urstoff akin to the ‘‘plasm’’ of Walter Jon Wil­liams’s Metropolitan world. But Blade codes as quite science-fictional, focusing tightly on the constraints of sublight space travel, encounters with nonhuman intelligences, and questions of near and distant galactic history. Even the most magical-seeming elements – the reshaping of bod­ies and minds, the calling forth of the silver, the creation of the blade, the possibility of the intru­sion of powers from outside our universe – feel material and intelligible rather than numinous. In these nearly magical tales, sense of wonder is brought a bit closer down to earth, if not Earth. (A final revelation suggests that is a story yet to be told.)

This review and more like it in the April 2024 issue of Locus.

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