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by: Linda Nagata
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781857987454
ISBN: 1857987454
Label: Gollancz
Manufacturer: Gollancz
Number Of Pages: 359
Publication Date: February 08, 2001
Publisher: Gollancz
Sales Rank: 1393226
Studio: Gollancz
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
VAST takes science to the very edges of human knowledge and Science Fiction to a new level of wonder. An impossibly advanced bio-tech ship and its crew are being pursued by an alien craft. They have been hunted for decades and will be hunted for decades more. If they survive. Bio-engineering has given man near immortality but it has also allowed him the time to meet the alien Chenzeme. But perhaps not long enough to understand them. And so mankind’s greatest and most desperate war has flared across known space. He fights in ships he has been engineered into – melding his consciousness and his physical form seamlessly into the bio-walls and nerve systems of the craft. But bio-engineering cannot remove fear and the suspicion of betrayal.
Amazon.com Review:
The Vast curtain opens with four crew members on the vessel Null Boundary making their centuries-long journey towards the star system of Alpha Cygni. More refugees from a broken civilization than explorers, they seek the Chenzeme, murderers of the human race, whose 30-million-year-old warships prowl the near and far reaches of space, destroying all they encounter.
Linda Nagata is remarkably adept at introducing new concepts without disturbing the flow of the narrative. Vast molds human figures out of a clay of genetic, nano, and virtual technology, allowing their humanity to take primacy: 'It came without warning, making no sound. Lot first sensed its presence as a flash of motion in the central tunnel. He looked around, to see a flood spiraling down on him, white water sluicing through an invisible pipe, a snake made of water. It swept into the chamber; it coiled around him, an arm's length away. The coils of the snake melted together, and he was encased in a glistening shell. Charismata of exhilaration rained against his sensory tears, a strange foreign sense of greeting. Tendrils reached out to him from the shell's shimmering white surface, a thousand slender white tendrils brushing him. Faint touches. Where they contacted his skin suit they retracted, but where they touched his bruised face they stayed. Familiarity flooded him, a warm sense of union that eased the black pressure of the cult [virus] forever burning under his skin. A voice whispered in his ear, produced by a trembling membrane on the end of a tendril. 'You know us?''
Make sure you're in a comfortable position when you start reading: Linda Nagata is light years ahead of her contemporaries in writing heart-racing, hard-science SF. Once this story sinks its teeth into you, you won't hear the phone ringing or care that it's way past bedtime until the last page is turned. --Jhana Bach
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Like Alastair Reynolds, but sharper
Vast reminded me of Alastair Reyonld's Redemption Ark series (far future setting, ancient robot killers, ancient opposition to robot killers, humans caught in the middle), but I liked it better than Reynold's books. Here's why.
1) The focus is much narrower. The scene always stays with the 5 inhabitants of a single ship, which keeps the story more, well, story-like. Reynolds work is more "a bunch of related, interesting events," and Nagata's book is more like a single story. I prefer ... Read More
Rating:  - Vastly Entertaining
Vast was the first book by Nagata I read, a sequel to Deception Well. I know, out of order. I'm strange about series books. I feel (as a reviewer and a bookseller, not to mention as a recreational reader) that writers should make each and every book stand on its own, accessible to readers who pick it up "out
of order." I try not to get too obsessive about this, but I'm likely to read a series out of order if I happen to pick them up that way, as I did here.
I thought Vast was wonderful. ... Read More
Rating: - World-class, take-no-prisoners SF
At one point in this story someone's life is in danger. Usually this would be a major inconvenience, but at this particular moment it's a terrifying risk, because he "doesn't have a backup."
If that sentence makes sense to you, you can probably understand this book. If it doesn't, maybe you can't.
No, this is not an easy book. But if you can follow it, it will take you on a hair-raising and deeply thought-provoking journey across the stars.
The scale is -- mm-hm -- vast, ... Read More
Rating:  - Sorry, but...
I'm going to do something that I hate other people doing and that is to write a review of a book I have not finished. Not being able to finish a book makes you feel like you haven't been able to perform sexually - this has never happened to me before, honest! You almost feel like it MUST be your fault. So I sat back, tried again, but I couldn't do it.
I normally love novels that deal with massive cosmic concepts, with post-humanity, and with enormous scales of time and space. It was the title that ... Read More
Rating: - Vastly creative
Although nothing on the Bantam pb hints at it, this is a sequel to Deception Well I should have read first (and possibly the Bohr Maker and Tech Heaven, too, for the origins of the technology?). The characters and desperate situation are already fully formed as this escape-by-sentient-spaceship adventure begins, but you have clues and time to reconstruct enough of their history and motivation during the slow chase that begins the story (stretching over years, you'll wish you could enter cold sleep, too). The story ... Read More
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