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    Noumenon
    Noumenon
    Noumenon
    Audiobook15 hours

    Noumenon

    Written by Marina J. Lostetter

    Narrated by Celeste Ciulla

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    With nods to Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series, the real science of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, a touch of Hugh Howey's Wool, and told through echoes of Octavia Butler's voice, this is a powerful tale of space travel, adventure, discovery, and humanity that unfolds through a series of generational vignettes In 2088, humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth's solar system. But one uncertainty remains: Where do we go? Astrophysicist Reggie Straifer has an idea. He's discovered an anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics, and proposes the creation of a deep-space mission to find out whether the star is a weird natural phenomenon, or something manufactured. The journey will take eons. In order to maintain the genetic talent of the original crew, humankind's greatest ambition-to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy-is undertaken by clones. But a clone is not a perfect copy, and each new generation has its own quirks, desires, and neuroses. As the centuries fly by, the society living aboard the nine ships (designated "Convoy Seven") changes and evolves, but their mission remains the same: to reach Reggie's mysterious star and explore its origins-and implications. A mosaic novel of discovery, Noumenon-in a series of vignettes-examines the dedication, adventure, growth, and fear of having your entire world consist of nine ships in the vacuum of space. The men and women, and even the AI, must learn to work and live together in harmony, as their original DNA is continuously replicated and they are born again and again into a thousand new lives. With the stars their home and the unknown their destination, they are on a voyage of many lifetimes-an odyssey to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge and imagination.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 1, 2017
    ISBN9781501965715
    Author

    Marina J. Lostetter

    Marina J. Lostetter’s original short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! and InterGalactic Medicine Show, among other publications. Originally from Oregon, she now lives in Arkansas with her husband, Alex. Marina enjoys globe-trotting, board games, and all things art-related.

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    Reviews for Noumenon

    3.5/5

    94 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Such an excellent story! I’m thrilled to have found this. Strong characters and an interesting storyline kept my attention the entire time. The narrator did an outstanding job. You truly appreciate a great narration after suffering through others that can ruin a good story. I’m so sorry to have it end.
      Reminds me of Arthur C Clarke stories I used to read in high school and college. I don’t have much free time to just read, but my work allows me to enjoy audiobooks and Scribd has brought the joy of science fiction back to my busy life.
    • 4/5
      4 stars

      I'll never understand publishers' insistence on building up expectations for a book by comparing it to legends (and then bypassing the obvious comparison that would be Tau Zero in this case).

      First fumbling block for me with this book was the writing. I can't pin point what it is, but the writing just didn't flow for me. It worked a lot better after I started listening to this on audio, but it still wasn't quite to my tastes. The writing wasn't bad by any means, simply not to my tastes.

      The book handled some really interesting concepts from cloning as procreation to (anthropomorphized) AI to time dilation to the stages a closed society goes through during centuries in deep the space. Oddly enough, this book also had me in tears a couple of times, which gives it bonus points.

      The development of the humans on Earth during the couple millennia between launch and re-entry was at first interesting, but in the end somewhat disappointing. I feel like the author could have done that more cleanly, as now it just felt somehow hurried and underdeveloped. But still, not bad. (The language of the current Earthlings was a little ehhh, though.)

      I wish the book would have focused more on the focus of the journey and what they found, but I guess that's what we have the second book for.
      ---
      Re-read 03/2021 in preparation for the third part. Still a solid four star.
    • 4/5
      If I told you what I liked about this, I'd probably spoil some part of it. It isn't perfect—I kept thinking of Becky Chambers' generation fleet—but this has its own charms.
    • 3/5
      A bit too open ended for my liking.
    • 1/5
      This had lots of positive blurbs from well-known sf authors and, more importantly, it was 99p for the ebook, so I decided to take a chance on it. What a mistake. I’ve not read a good science fiction debut by a US author for several years but this one failed to make even that low bar. It is 2088 and an astronomer has discovered an unusual variable star. The world is putting together twelve missions to travel into interstellar space, using a “subdimension drive”, which, despite being FTL, will still mean several generations will pass before their destinations are reached. The variable star is chosen as the target of one such convoy. Which comprises seven ships and several hundred thousand clones of the scientists and engineers who put the convoy together. Lostetter uses this somewhat tired set-up to explore a number of banal situations. A young boy doesn’t want a sister. Slavery is bad. AIs can have feelings too. When the convoy reaches its destination, it discovers an enormous alien artefact but does not learn what it is or what it’s for. The author also clearly has a problem with orders of magnitude, as she states Jupiter is one AU wide. And her dimensions of the alien artefact make no sense. She also seems to think sonar works in space (and that subsonic waves can be detected in a vacuum). When two US characters, in the first chapter, enter a traditional pub in Oxford, UK, and a waitress brings beer to their table, I was afraid this was going to be one of those sf novels where the author had done little or no research. That particular faux pas proved to be the least of the book’s problems. Later, two characters watch an episode of Star Trek – yes, this one of those novels set in the future where all the cultural references have relevance only to the author’s generation. The prose is so bland it is entirely forgettable. The science fiction is just complete rubbish from start to finish. The science is made-up. And the whole is in service to a plot which has no end – this is the first book in a trilogy – and whose only quality appears to be triteness. Avoid. In fact, I will go a step further: from this point, I will not read any debuts by US sf authors, say, post-2016. I don’t know what’s happened to US sf publishing, but the books they’ve been pushing over the past couple of years by debut authors have been fucking appalling. As someone or other once said, won’t get fooled again. The same applies to fantasy as well, of course. However, I’m not going to boycott debut sf novels from other nations. I mean, I’m not saying UK sf debuts are better, but UK genre publishing has been pushing fantasy – and YA – debuts for the past few years, and they’re not my thing. Given that more books than ever before are currently being published, when debut novels are nominated for major awards… there is definitely something wrong with genre publishing….
    • 3/5
      I have read a LOT of science fiction over the years, of every conceivable sub-genre. This is essentially a generation starship novel, in which an Earth mission is sent to investigate a potentially alien artifact in a nearby star system. Because of the time displacement inherent in near light speed travel, the “there and back” voyage, which lasted about 250 years of ship time, extended to 3,000 years of Earth time.This story, in addition to the generation ship theme, also included elements of cloning, artificial intelligence and hard science fiction pertaining to near light speed travel and Dyson sphere technology. This was all presented in a series of vignettes, arranged chronologically, most aboard the generation ship.All in all, it was pretty run of the mill science fiction, though there were a couple of vignettes that I really didn’t care for. Some of the dialogue was painfully bad.
    • 3/5
      I would encourage you to consider the potential for speculative fiction to help us all drop our lazy assumptions about Realism, mimesis, and how any writing made up of words upon a page ever really relates to or captures some discernible, locatable "real world."As someone who prefers poetry over novels, I turn to speculative fiction, weird fiction, science fiction for the same sort of liberation from the tyrannous fantasy of the Real. Forget the mirror; look to the Lamp. Every piece of fiction is just that, fiction, and for those who read attentively and with appreciation of the power of the imagination Dickens's London in Bleak House and Eliot's Middlemarch are just as artificial and speculative and weird as Carroll's Looking Glass world or Stoker's Transylvania or Barrie's Neverland or Mirrlees Lud-in-the-Mist or Jack Vance's Dying Earth or Peake's Gormenghast or China Mieville's New Crobuzon. All of these fantastic places are projections of the imagination. All of them hold prime value in the way they transport us away from our easy assumptions about what is real and then return us, much changed.In his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov is quite good at pointing out the need to redraw our maps and drop our assumptions. The gist of what he says is that every time we open a novel we are visiting a new potential world, very different from our own ideas about our own world, and we will be sorely misguided unless we redraw our maps and learn to see difference everywhere.Finally, I must admit that I am drawn to speculative fiction for its decadent, art-for-art's sake aspects. Because I studied Victorian poetry, it reminds of me of Swinburne's urgent lesson. It matters not whether the art deals with Past or Present or Future or something apparently unknown. Instead, what matters is the excellence of the writing, the breadth of the imagination.You might think what does a Generation Spaceship Novel Using Almost All of the Tropes of Vintage SF has got to do with locating the “real world”? Ah. That’s the beauty of Lostetter’s approach. Who would have thought we would get SF like this in 2018 (the year I read it)? For starters, the Generation Spaceship Novels of Old I read them all. Off the top of my head: “Book of the Long Sun”, “The Ballad of Beta-2”, “Tau Zero”, “Orphans of the Sky”, “Eon”, “Eternity”, “Cities in Flight”, “Rendezvous with Rama”, etc. What does “Noumenon” bring to the table? It tells the story through several vignettes; their use was a clever idea, because Lostetter didn’t go for the easy way out by using a Sleeper G-Ship. By using the AI I.C.C. in all of the vignettes we’ve got a continuity between them. Strangely, no religion and no ethical considerations which in terms of world-building diminished the returns of the novel. Also and unfortunately, the Physics of space travel (“subdimensional spacetime”) had a fluffy feeling. I’d like to have had a bit of substance when it came to exploring the SD device. I could see what Lostetter was doing by concentrating on the human aspects rather than on the more hard stuff. I just like my SF with more meat…the cloning idea was also superb, but was not fully explored. I hear there’s a sequel. Maybe Lostetter is saving digging deeper for later. I’m not sure whether Lostetter can deliver the goods.In a SFional milieu it’s much more difficult to come up with an independent source of ethical behaviour (humans vs clones). The ethical bodies simply reflect society rather than a scientific basis for ethical behaviour. Science says “How”. Philosophy and Religion say “Why”. “How does this work?” and “Therefore how shall I behave?” are not in the same field. You have to be outside of the system to understand the system. A human clone would be a perfect subject for notions about humans having a divine spirit which, according to some, materializes at conception. Of course, no one has proved that regular humans have this attribute, but what fun it would have been if Lostetter had gone down that particular road. We as part of the Hominid spectrum, are especially inventive and intuitive. What if, possibly, just envisage...that potentially humankind, might be the first wave of intelligence in the galaxy. Or potentially, we may be the remnants of a far more ancient intellect. The point being, cloning is just another jewel in our crown. Nothing, upsets me, astonishes me, adores me, hates me, tantalises me more...than the human condition in a SF novel. We admonish ourselves too heartily, we should really focus on our extreme and very poetic brilliance. The tapestry of mankind, is forever the Cosmos, we exist to explore it, to be beguiled by it, hopefully one day to come to a relative understanding of it. Do not fear cloning, embrace it, as just another beautiful aspect of our species genius.Alas, we can’t have everything…3 stars for the mighty effort.
    • 5/5
      Noumenon is an ambitious book, even by science fiction standards. To investigate a curious far-distant phenomena, Earth conceives an idea to send a fleet of generation ships. Rather than using cryogenics or relying on the whims of breeding, they staff the ships by finding the best scientists in the world to fit specific duties, and they clone them. Generation after generation. This allows nature versus nurture to play out in surprising ways.This sounds like it might get confusing. It's not. The novel progresses through a series of long short stories or novelettes; some feature complete arcs and can stand on their own (one chapter is published in a new Baen Memorial Award anthology), but overall, they flow together to create a comprehensive novel that skips decades and even centuries.Honestly, I'm usually turned off by books or series that span generations. It disturbs me to become fond of young characters and then watch them die of old age. For some reason, that wasn't an issue here--perhaps because of the nature of clones? I did become attached to the character of Jamal, which just about broke my heart at a few points, but I like how Lostetter developed his line through the end and how the ship's sentient AI played a role.In all, this is a very different kind of sci-fi novel because it twists around so many familiar tropes in inventive new ways.
    • 4/5
      ** Full disclosure: I received this book in exchange for an honest review**In 2088, humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth’s solar system. But one uncertainty remains: Where do we go?A post scarcity Earth decides to send out expeditions to explore the universe, this book follows the one sent on a journey expected to take centuries to complete, to explore a distant star that isn’t behaving the way it is supposed to.I found the questions posed by this concept to be fascinating and I was really curious to see how or even if, the author addressed all of them. While I didn’t always agree with the authors conclusions, she did seem to have at least touched on just about all of them so that made me happy. Each chapter deals with a different span of time in the course of the journey and from a different characters point of view each time. I found this worked really well for showing how the culture of the convey changed over time without getting to bogged down by too much back story, but it did make it confusing to keep track of who the characters were since they were all clones of the original crew and for the most part used the same names. For positives, I thought the world building, science and seeing how the choices made before the convoy even left Earth both changed and had ongoing impact on everything that came after, especially enjoyed seeing how a closed society can and will grow and evolve.For negatives, it was a little hard to get attached to many of the characters, with each chapter and time jump the names and many of the personalities seemed to stay they same even though I knew they were different people and I had trouble keeping who was who straight at times.And towards the end there were a few chapters felt as though they went on a bit too long which caused the story to drag a bit. These issues aside, I did really enjoy this book and found myself really excited with each chapter to see how things were going to change with each jump forward and I will be watching out for this author going forward.