Ahhhhh!… (<— sigh), how I love hard Sci-Fi. How much I missed it!
This is a very interesting book, which creates dreams and frees the mind from any worries. A balm before going to sleep. Although reading it requires absolute concentration and a certain intellectual effort that, luckily, is rewarded by the good hours you spend while reading it.
The book places our characters in a distant future in which the Solar System is colonized by humans, in which some humans have evolved into something beyond and in which artificial intelligence has also evolved beyond all expectations.
Our protagonists live in the Corona Teven a habitat located near Jupiter and having a toroidal shape. Without a doubt, a world inspired by the Ringworld of Larry Niven, but unlike the latter, its inhabitants do not live isolated from the rest of humanity, but rather have as neighbors other human habitats with which the founders of the crown interact when they wish.
Both the Corona Teven Like the rest of the human universe, it is colonized by millions of people who can live together, but they are not all located on the same plane of reality. Thanks to what the author calls collectors, each society can create an environment in which to move and interact with its close beings without interfering with other societies. That is, many societies created by each other can coexist in the same physical location. collectors distinct, without interfering with each other. Every society created by a manifold It is a culture in itself, with a unique history, mythology and technology, albeit virtual. Interaction between humans from different collectors is limited and one of our protagonists is a diplomat who moves between societies of different collectors and who will be the one to show us what her world is like.
This theoretically idyllic society begins to crumble when an entity called 3340 begins to interfere with the collectors and try to break down the barriers that keep the technology under control.
In the book we have nanotechnology, terraforming, virtual reality, interstellar travel, AI that thinks it is God, post-humans who also think they are God, and countless other things that make it a real joy to read.
The author, who has a way of telling the story that is reminiscent of Greg Bear, strives at all times to make the universe credible and to explain the philosophy of its inhabitants and its interesting political system based on the open source theories that we all know.
In short, a highly recommended book that is worth reading.
