I believe heard about this book I believe at the online Dream Foundry convention 2 months ago during a panel on AI characters. I started reading it a few days ago and it is not an exaggeration to say that this book has been inhabiting my dreams for the last few days. I couldn’t stop thinking about it! This is one of the best descriptions of what life onboard an ark ship would be like as it moved further and further in both time and space from Earth. I am having a hard time classifying this book. In many ways it is Space Opera… vast setting, ark ship, colonists and scientists, but it is also relatively hard SF; the descriptions of the ships and the humans on board are very realistic.
The premise is this: Humanity has developed SD (sub dimensional) drive which allows for interstellar travel. The novel is set up as a series of loosely connected short stories, each set approximately 20-50 years later in the narrative. The first story is the presentation by one person, a newly minted PhD who makes the case for LQ Pyxidis, an odd star with variable intensity that might be unnatural in origin. The rest of the stories follow the various crew members through time and space.
The SD drive passes the ships into a sub dimensional space where time doesn’t flow the same way, so for each day that passes on ship, about 10 days pass back on Earth. The approximately 100 year journey, plus study time, and then the return, means that 2000 years will pass on Earth before the travelers return. At about the midpoint of the story, the crew arrives at their destination… what do they find? You’ll have to read it to find out.
I was so absorbed in this story and its characters and its world… I had a hard time putting it down. I found myself thinking about what might happen and how the Earth might have been changed during the long absence. I imagined a dark future… but what the author presents is beyond anything I could have imagined and it shows a true divergence of culture between the two different races of human beings. I am very much looking forward to the next 2 books in this series.