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A review by snowcrash
Bright Light: Star Carrier: Book Eight by Ian Douglas
3.0
Here we find ourselves in the 8th installment of the ongoing saga of the humans vs. the rest of the galaxy. At present I'm not sure how much more can be mined from this story. I have read everything written by the author under this pseudonym. I think his older books have more substance.
As always, the author takes the latest ideas of today and extrapolates them out to an extreme. Don't get me wrong, it is part of the fun to see how far they play out. Tabby's Star is an excellent example. Or the idea of emergent intelligence from trillions of individual micro machines. Here it is mainly a quest for the humans to communicate with things bigger and more advanced then themselves. Not as much action this time around, just a lot more zooming around with some problems waved away (lots of expository paragraphs about time dilation).
In the end, this is about average space opera. The author has done much of this before. It does feel like this could be an end point in the series. I think eight books is long enough. As I said, the author's books are overall a lot of fun to read. He makes excellent points about consciousness and the merging of organic & machine intelligences. But he needs a new story to bring a fresh perspective.
As always, the author takes the latest ideas of today and extrapolates them out to an extreme. Don't get me wrong, it is part of the fun to see how far they play out. Tabby's Star is an excellent example. Or the idea of emergent intelligence from trillions of individual micro machines. Here it is mainly a quest for the humans to communicate with things bigger and more advanced then themselves. Not as much action this time around, just a lot more zooming around with some problems waved away (lots of expository paragraphs about time dilation).
In the end, this is about average space opera. The author has done much of this before. It does feel like this could be an end point in the series. I think eight books is long enough. As I said, the author's books are overall a lot of fun to read. He makes excellent points about consciousness and the merging of organic & machine intelligences. But he needs a new story to bring a fresh perspective.