I orginally read The Red Trilogy before picking up Linda Nagata's new series, Edges. Her first series was about a military team linked to AI trying to determine if the AI is helping or playing them. Edges is the first book in a future a thousand year later in which mankind has both reached the stars and had machines turn on them. It's pretty complicated and we'll see how the series plays out, but author obviously put a lot of thought into the nature of intelligence and humanity. My one note for the author is it feels like they withhold their punches in writing sometimes. Feels like if Ender's Game grew up and skipped forward 1,000+ years in time. Interesting book. Looking forward to reading the next in the series.

This is the Author's 1st book in a new series that follows on from her Nanotech Succession books and whilst it can be read as a standalone reading the previous books might set the worldbuiling in place .

Humanity left Earth eons ago , the use of nannotechnolgy makes the huge leaps in advancement prevalent .
Living on the edges of the Galaxy on the Planet Deception they are constantly on the look out for any appearance of the Chenzeme, automated alien warships programmed to eradicate all life in the universe .
When one of the robotic ships appears they all fear the worst , until Urban , once a member of the expedition that founded Deception , appears - he has found a way to to pilot the ship , named Dragon , and brought it home .
The story of his new scientific expedition would take Humans back to the Hallowed Vasties - the cradle of civilisation devasted by the Chenzeme - what will they find ?, what has replaced them ? is there anything left to find or is it all just dust ?

This is an interesting premise of reverse history - making for a thoroughly entertaining book - I look forward to more of the same in the future .
I was given an arc of the book by NetGalley and the Publisher in exchange for an honest review

This novel is set millennia later in the author's Nanotech Succession universe; I read it without having read the previous books, and it worked great for me -- but it made me go back and read the original series, which is also highly enjoyable. However, that series is not required reading for Edges, which stands on its own.

The series is called The Inverted Frontier because it takes place many eons after humans’ exodus from Earth; in the intervening time, the explorers and their descendants, looking back, saw many planets become occluded by Dyson structures, and later only partially-occluded by fragments of those structures. It seems that civilization became greatly-advanced, but that something went wrong. So a number of the descendents, with stasis and advanced drive technology, decide to go back inward to find out what happened to the very advanced civilizations which rose and then fell after their ancestors’ departure.

This is a big adventure full of big ideas and the authors' usual excellent extrapolations of science. Highly recommended.

The remnants of humanity hide in the furthest reaches of known space on the planet Deception Well, on the lookout for any appearance of the Chenzeme, automated alien warships programmed to eradicate all life in the universe. They believe their worst fears realized when a Chenzeme ship arrives in their system, but the crisis is short-lived: Urban, a long absent member of the expedition that founded the settlement on Deception Well, discovered how to overtake the Chenzeme ships and has piloted this one, called Dragon, home. The new scientific endeavor he proposes would take humanity backward through its frontier to the Hallowed Vasties—the legendary systems surrounding the cradle of their civilization devastated by the Chenzeme incursion—to uncover both the artifacts of their past and to discover what has replaced them.
Edges is the first volume of a new space opera series by Nagata, who most recently has penned a sequence of stunning near-future military thrillers (The Red Trilogy, The Last Good Man). If it sounds like a lot of backstory for a first-in-a-series novel, it is. Inverted Frontier is a sequel series to her Nanotech Succession, four standalone novels that speculate, across huge leaps in time, how humanity might evolve through the use of nanotechnology. While there is a lot of future history to unpack, Nagata provides more than enough background for Edges to work as an entry point for new readers. I would also propose that new readers then take their own backward journey of discovery and read the Nanotech novels in reverse chronological order, starting with its far-future conclusion Vast, and ending with the near-future prequel Tech Heaven.
Edges takes its time setting the table: it is more than a third of the way through before the expedition makes its first major discovery. The slow burn is worth it; Nagata depicts a human civilization so far removed from our present understanding that time is almost meaningless, and the notion of life correlating to physical presence was long ago abandoned. Its technology a hybrid of human and alien, both near-unfathomable in complexity and capability that even the brilliant minds who wield it don’t always fully understand it. All this background comes in handy when the crew of Dragon encounter something so sublime and terrifying it regards the Chenzeme with little more than curious indifference. Nagata raises the tension one notch at a time as the ship moves closer to its destination, and by the end, somehow creates stakes that even a god would fear. Edges will satisfy any readers of Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Trilogy jonesing for a new “big idea” space opera operating on that scale.

Complex world building in a character driven book. This is the first in a new series and there is a lot to take in. There is the trip to find out what happened in the past, the way people upload and make ghosts, and the danger at the end. Great start and full of unique concepts.

Edges is an intellectual space opera featuring an epic journey to discover the answers of the lost human race. The writing is pristine, featuring strong characters who quest for the answers to humanity’s potential demise. With the dangers of a past war lurking on the outskirts and technologies that are a marvel to imagine, Edges is a science fiction novel that’s both entertaining and intellectually stimulating.

Nagata dives deep into the many technological marvels of her deep space explorers, going against the boundaries of time and consciousness to explore the known universe. We’re asked to consider the psychology of genetic copies of ourselves, of sending your mind across the universe for a millennia while leaving your body behind. Two versions of yourself exist, creating an interesting paradox. This is highly evolved space exploration that goes beyond generations. The explorer is forever an explorer, existing in a digital space with occasional biological wrappers of sorts. If you could experience anything and everything, forever, would you make that choice? It’s an interesting dilemma.

The premise of the story is fascinating as our explorers try to rediscover the human race. This is a future so far from our own time that humanity has spread to the furthest reaches of the universe. Through a devastating war, communications have disappeared, leaving those on the outskirts to face their telescopes back toward home in the hopes of rediscovering their own kind. That concept of backtracking makes for a fascinating plot.

Overall, Edges is an epic journey through space by a select few and it’s a pleasure to go along for the ride.

Edges started out reminding me of Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly in which people are digitized then reinstated at a new location to allow for distant travel. In Kelly's novelette, only one version of each person is allowed. In Edges, things can be much more complex. Duplicates of individuals are not only allowed, they are central to the story.

In Edges, world building and tech take the lead over the cast of characters and it took a bit to invest in the science of the story rather than the people in it. The ship, Dragon, is as more of a character than part of the setting. I like how the processes the people go through, duplicating and merging, are central to the complexity of the plot.

I'm new to Nagata so have not read any of the books in her series The Nanotech Succession. In spite of this, I was able to keep up with what was going on in her universe without any difficulty. I didn't feel like the tale was slowed down by any back story, though I can't say if I'd read The Nanotech Succession I would think differently.

Overall, I liked Edges. It did take some time to get used to the amount of detail about the ship's workings and the transient nature if its crew. A good finish (lots of action) however I felt the initial premise of the book (finding out what is going on in the Hallowed Vasties) wasn't satisfied and will have to look to the next volume to find out since Edges is definitely more about the journey than the destination.

Like some other reviewers I am an old fashioned reader. A space opera needs to grab my attention and not let it go. "Edges" is part of a very complicated series with long and boring explanations about the Universe and situations. Those explanations are difficult to do well without losing the reader. Nagata lost me. DNF.

A wholly unique reading experience for me. I thought the premise was so well thought out. Great character development that is explored from so many areas. I am really looking forward to exploring more of the Hallowed Vasties. I hope this book gets the award buzz it deserves.

This is my first book by this author, and it was a good one. She is obviously a very talented writer. As always, I look for a solid plot, well-crafted dialog, and interesting characters, and this worked for me on all those fronts; with some mystery to boot! I'm not a fan of cliff-hangers, but sometimes that's what you signup for in a series. I look forward to the next book and recommend this one.

Thanks very much for the advanced copy for review!

I read an advance reader copy of Linda Nagata’s Edges, in uncorrected proof ebook, provided to me by Mythic Island Press through netgalley, in return for promising to write an honest review. The book is scheduled for release on April 2, 2019. It is the first of a new series, known as “Inverted Frontier”, which is in turn an extension of Nagata’s “Nanotech Succession” sequence. Quite a few years ago, I read all of the prior Nanotech Succession - Tech-Heaven (1995), The Bohr Maker (1995), Deception Well (1997), and Vast (1998).

Linda Nagata is a highly original American SF writer, who publishes under her independent publishing imprint Mythic Island Press. Her “The Bohr Maker” was the winner of the 1996 Locus Award for First Novel, and she has collected other awards and nominations since then. Nagata’s original fame is based on the Nanotech Succession, which was foundational within the subgenre. For example, Alastair Reynolds has cited it as an influence on his own writing. After a variety of other directions, Edges is now Nagata’s return to her nanoware-permeated post-human universe. The novel is described as a new entry point into the universe, but I feel there are still a lot of backstory references that make Inverted Frontier not purely a stand-alone series.

The story opens aboard a defensive/scientific station around Deception Well, a few centuries after the conclusion of Vast. The society established by those human survivors of the Null Boundary Expedition who took refuge on the alien world is now somewhat stagnant, making only incidental use of the more exotic technologies known to exist, some left behind by the original alien creators of Deception Well. Into that world comes another survivor of the Null Boundary Expedition, Urban, who has entered into a symbiotic relationship with surviving artifacts of the alien chenzeme. There are a number of coexisting intelligence groups involved and held in evolving balance with one another – human factions, nanoware of the Deception Well creators, nanoware of the chenzeme, and one further mysterious entity. The essential minds of human beings can be stored in machines and restored. There is also duplication, remerge, subsetting, and deliberate personality alteration – resulting in multiple instances of the same character, for specialized purposes and backup.

As you might imagine, creating sympathetic characters with such braided lifelines is difficult, and indeed I felt that keeping it all straight was a real problem for Deception Well and Vast. In Edges, Nagata has included more explicit explanations of the intelligences and the characters’ varied emotions regarding what is happening to them. That is an improvement, and it also helps with the backstory. I feel that the choice of second person voice for mysterious entity was somewhat awkward, but could possibly make more sense once the origin of the entity is revealed. Finally, be aware that by the end of this volume, there are important mysteries left unresolved for the next volume.

Humankind is in shambles. Most worlds have been destroyed by the Chenzeme robot ships. One world had survived and now was on a fly by from a Chenzeme ship, The ship was piloted by a human though.

Edges is the first in a new Sci-Fi Series* - the Inverted Frontier - by author Linda Nagata. I've read Nagata's "The Red" trilogy, which was a fun and interesting MilSci trilogy that I enjoyed but didn't quite love, and her short story from last year which I ranked #2 on my Hugo list (The Martian Obelisk). So when I saw this book pop up on Netgalley, I was interested to see how much I'd enjoy her work when it's not in a genre I have a history of not particularly caring for (MilSci)

*Note: Edges is the first in a new trilogy/series which takes place in the same universe as Linda Nagata's "The Nanotech Succession" universe, and judging from the book summaries on Amazon, several characters and parts of this setting were first introduced in those books. However, I haven't read any of those prior books and had no problem following along with this story, so there's no need to go read those earlier books to enjoy Edges, though I may go back and try to track those novels down anyhow.

Edges is a high-concept SciFi novel, and it works particularly well after perhaps a rough start. Like some other books (Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire trilogy comes to mind), Edges shows no interest in holding the readers hand as it introduces SF concepts without much explanation whatsoever (although it's possible explanations are in prior works of this universe), and the result is that it's kind of an awkward read for its first 20%. But the result in the end is really well done and definitely different from what I'm used to, so I look forward to seeing how this series plays out.

-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Humanity has spent the last few centuries hiding out in a planetary system known as the Deception Well, where ancient alien technology has kept humanity protected from the Chenzeme - alien spaceships that travel the stars with a mission of genocide of all intelligent life they come across. The remnants in the Deception Well have no idea if any other humans are still alive out there in the galaxy, and the remnants of the systems near Earth, once known to contain megastructures such as Dyson Spheres, are now simply known as the mysterious "Hallowed Vasties."

But when one of the Founders of the Deception Well colony, a man named Urban, returns having commandeered a Chenzeme Ship, he expresses a desire to return to explore what is left in the Hallowed Vasties, if anything at all....and the interest he finds in the journey is far greater than he anticipated. And so a crew of humans, in the forms of physical avatars filled with nanotech or virtual reality ghosts, join together on the ship "Dragon" to explore, but the journey is far from simple. For the Chemzeme ship is far from completely under control and still seeks to purge anything of human origin from its insides...and over 60 such individuals are now present in some form aboard.

And out there deep in space is the remnant of another civilization, a being long lost in space, but technologically capable enough to deal with the Chenzeme, and its own agenda it wishes to enforce. A being that will seek to take advantage of Dragon's journey to the Hallowed Vasties, no matter the cost to the remnants of humanity contained within.....
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My favorite books in general tend to be books built upon strong characters, with me favoring character work above descriptions and technological overload, and Edges is not that type of book. It has some pretty decent characters, mainly with its lead duo of Urban and Clemantine, but the book is very much more about seeing how characters in general react in these Sci-Fi situations, with the book throwing a lot of sci-fi ideas out there (some of these, in addition to some of the characters, may have been present in the prior works in this universe I haven't read).

So as background, this is a world in which humans can exist in multiple forms - as "Avatars," physical beings made up of nanomachines that function for various purposes - or as "Ghosts," non-physical forms in virtual reality - or in sleep/archive, where a being's mind is stored for later restoration as a ghost or avatar. Moreover, by creating a new ghost or avatar, a human can split their identity by having multiple existences at once undergoing different experiences and memories, with the existences later being able to merge their memories so that they each have experienced the same events (or so that after one existence is terminated, another will know everything it did).

Other concepts that form core parts of the plot are the idea of the Chenzeme ships being made up of "philosopher cells," which seek to eliminate anything non-Chenzeme, and how Urban and Clemantine have to try and enforce their wills upon it. Then there are the "Apparatchniks," the Ghost copies of Urban which he's altered to have specialized roles (like "engineer"), who the characters have to interact with as they try and troubleshoot the problems involved.

All of these concepts come together to form the plot of this story, which is basically our characters using and manipulating all of these concepts to try and solve the issues faced by the journey to the Hallowed Vasties, a journey that now includes far more humans than expected on board a ship that well...wants to kill all the humans on board. Every now and then we see glimpses of an unknown entity that eventually interacts with our crew and causes new problems, as it has its own agenda that isn't necessarily friendly, requiring even more quick thinking and manipulation of these concepts in order to save the crew. The results are really interesting and well done, with ethical concepts of the technologies, unintended implications, and other ideas examined quite well by the text as things go on, making this book rather easy to read despite all of the ideas involved.

The book has a few issues mind you. Like I said above the jump, the first 10-15 % of the book introduces these concepts with little explanation or character work, resulting in the book reading kind of awkwardly and stunted at the start, but if you can power through that the book gains momentum and becomes rather interesting. The book also has occasional chapters from the antagonist's point of view in the Second Person, which feel a little awkward, especially in the first 1/3 of the book where the antagonist is far far away from the action. And while there are 3-4 characters with decently interesting personalities, the book kind of doesn't bother to go into the backgrounds of anyone (some of this may be due to the prior books in this universe, but not all of it) resulting in the characters, especially some of the minor ones who become more present in the final act, feeling more like skeletons than anything else. I didn't really care too much about any specific character in general, but I did manage to care about the crew as a whole, which was enough to make the plot work. And the ending ends on a pretty major cliffhanger but resolves at least the major plot arc that is kicked off by this book, so it is rather satisfying.

All said, definitely worth a read if you're interested in high-concept SciFi - despite not being the type of character-driven work I kind of prefer, I'll definitely be going forward with this series when the next books come out.

Cuando supe que Linda Nagata volvía a su universo Nanotech Succession (como The Bohr Maker) pero con una nueva puerta de entrada, el proyecto me gustó. Me pareció original esa “exploración inversa” del espacio, a la contra de la marea colonizadora que en un principio hizo expandirse a la humanidad.

Edges cover for Linda Nagatas’s Inverted Frontier Book 1 by artist Sarah Anne Langton
En este sentido, Edges cumple con lo que esperaba. Las ideas de la autora resultan muy interesantes, como las naves biológicas conformadas por distintas especies que trabajan en simbiosis aún siendo máquinas de Von Neumann tipo berserker, o la evolución del concepto “ser humano” cuando el cuerpo es un elemento accesorio e intercambiable. De hecho, uno de los debates más interesantes se entabla cuando conocemos a las distintas “personalidades” que un personaje ha ido creando y afinando para asignarles tareas repetitivas. Son versiones de sí mismo optimizadas para una tarea particular sin capacidad de distracción. Incluso tienen modificada su capacidad de percibir el paso del tiempo. En un arranque de humor, Nagata los llama Apparátchiky es una definición sorprendentemente adecuada.
No obstante, el ritmo de la novela no acompaña a estas ideas. Es obvio que cuando se explora el espacio, con sus distancias gargantuescas, gran parte del tiempo se dedica a no “hacer nada”, pasando por criogenización o directamente almacenando la consciencia. Nagata no consigue que estos periodos de espera desaparezcan totalmente de la novela, aunque usa algunas elipsis y mete alguna trama secundaria de relleno. Por esto, en ocasiones la lectura se vuelve demasiado morosa.
Si conseguimos soslayar este hecho, bien bajo el influjo hipnótico de las ideas de la autora, bien por la curiosidad por saber qué se van a encontrar por el camino, Edges es un buen ejemplo de ciencia ficción dura explicada y atractiva.
Lo que no he sido capaz de juzgar con pleno conocimiento es si el libro se entendería mejor habiendo leído las entregas anteriores. Es una sensación un tanto extraña estar leyendo y pensar que te estás perdiendo referencias. El libro es perfectamente disfrutable de por sí, pero siempre me quedará la duda sobre si sería una experiencia más completa con este bagaje.

Honest review here. I'm more of an old-fashioned science fiction reader from way back. I like a good space opera with good ideas (check), a little action (check), interesting characters (oops), and a minimum of human drama (uh-oh). I've read a couple other books in her Chenzeme series and enjoyed one or two of the stories while finding others not to my liking. This one has too much boyfriend-girlfriend stuff for me. Other readers will probably be ok with that and this book is for them. If you've liked the series so far I'm sure you'll like this one.