The Golden Age | 
 enlarge | Author: John Wright
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Category: EBooks
List Price: $4.99
Buy New: $3.99
You Save: $1.00 (20%)
Rating:  78 reviews
Sales Rank: 21434
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
ASIN: B000FA5QJK
Publication Date: May 20, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Amazon.com Review
The Golden Age is the most ambitious and impressive science fiction novel since China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Amazingly, it is John C. Wright's debut novel. In the far future, humans have become as gods: immortal, almost omnipotent, able to create new suns and resculpt body and mind. A trusting son of this future, Phaethon of Radamanthus House, discovers the rulers of the solar system have erased entire centuries from his mind. When he attempts to regain his lost memories, the whole society of the Golden Oecumene opposes him. Like his mythical namesake, Phaethon has flown too high and been cast down. He has committed the one act forbidden in his utopian universe. Now he must find out what it is--and who he is. A novel influenced by Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, and A.E. van Vogt, yet uniquely itself, The Golden Age presents a complex and thoroughly imagined future that will delight science fiction fans. John C. Wright has a gift for big, bold concepts and extrapolations, and his smoothly written novel pushes cyberpunk's infotech density to a new level, while abandoning cyberpunk's nihilistic noir tone for SF's original optimism. Big ideas are joined by big themes; Wright provocatively explores the nature of heroism, the nature of power, and the conflict between the rights of the individual and those of society. Fiction as ambitious as The Golden Age is never flawless. Action fans will find this novel too talky. A change of quests late in the novel is jarring. And, while this Romance of the Far Future suitably examines the heroic virtues, its unfortunate subtext is "heroism is a guy thing." This far-future novel published in 2002 maintains a credulity-shattering mid-20th-century sexual status quo. Not all plotlines are resolved in The Golden Age, and a sequel is forthcoming. --Cynthia Ward
Product Description
The Golden Age is Grand Space Opera, a large-scale SF adventure novel in the tradition of A. E. Van Vogt and Roger Zelazny (with perhaps a bit of Cordwainer Smith enriching the style). It is an astounding story of super science, a thrilling wonder story that recaptures the excitements of SF's golden age writers. Phaethon, of Radamanthus House, is attending a glorious party at his family mansion celebrating the thousand year anniversary of the High Transcendence. There he meets an old man who accuses him of being an imposter, and then an alien from Neptune (resembling a small iceberg) who claims to be an old friend. The alien tells him that essential parts of his memory were removed and stored by the very government Phaethon believes to be wholly honorable. It shakes his faith. He is an exile from himself. And so Phaethon embarks upon a quest across the transformed solar system--Jupiter is now a second sun, Mars and Venus terraformed, humanity immortal--among humans, intelligent machines, and bizarre life forms, to recover his memory, and to learn what crime he planned to warrant such preemptive punishment. His quest is to regain his true identity. The Golden Age is one of the major, ambitious SF novels of the year and the international launch of an important new figure in the genre.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 73 more reviews...
 Absolutely amazing- and I very rarely use that word. May 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read the golden age trilogy during a fairly dark time in my life. I was hunkered down in this awful pedo clinic my fourth year of dental school. Residents were wrapping screaming kids up to drill on their teeth, and I was the lucky one who got to hold their heads still. I was going on my sixth week there.
I didn't have a car, so I was taking this shuttle thing for about an hour ride, and each way I was reading the Golden Age trilogy.
The books have all the standard things that make for a good sci fi read. Cool aliens, cool technology, action and adventure. There's something about these books though that make them stand out. Theres a deep mythology here. I don't mean "mythology" like in some cheezy Robert Jordan book, I mean mythology like it speaks to some deep Jungian type architecture in the human (or at least in my) subconscious. There is something incredibly noble and humane in these books. They are as important and as good, and certainly more enjoyable, imho, as any of the great "classics" like Brother Karamozoff, etc. Highly recommended to readers and lovers of sci fi.
What does it mean to really live? January 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Golden Age and the subsequent two books in the series explore the question of what it means to live your life, as opposed to simply continuing to exist. The world of the Golden Oecumene has created amazing wonders of technology and conquered death and crime. But what can give meaning to life in a utopia? What can inspire people to great deeds that differentiate a golden age from the dark ages? The Golden Oecumene may have perfect tranquility, but it also is stagnant and unimaginative. People have become increasingly withdrawn into their own little worlds, a term with a literal meaning in this society, as each person is free to reshape his perceptions to see the world exactly as he wants to see it instead of what it really is.
The novel's plot pits the world's entrenched oligarchy and their desire to keep things as they are, preserving their privileges, wealth and status, against one man who wants to do great things with his life. Phaeton's plan to send out colonies to other stars threatens to destroy the social order and the future security of the ruling class, whose monopolies in nearly every part of the economy would be destroyed by competition, and who will have no way to impose their will on the millions of those colonies. Furthermore, once the sun finishes its evolutionary course in a few hundred billion years, these immortals would have nowhere to escape if the nearby star systems are already colonized, and would have to die or to fall to the lowest strata of those societies. Needless to say, Phaeton is not a popular man with these people, and they try to put him in his place. Ultimately, they fail (not in this book; in The Golden Transcendence : Or, The Last of the Masquerade (The Golden Age)), demonstrating the futility of trying suppress humanity's progress.
Admittedly, the book can be heavy reading for non-technical people. Even today, technology pervades our world, and just as a savage would gaze incomprehendingly upon our computers, iPhones, and airplanes, so do we have difficulty with the ideas that must be understood to live in the Golden Oecumene, many millenia into the future. However, the technology really is central to the plot, as it is the underlying cause of that society's stagnation and corruption. A reader who takes his time to understand it would not only enrich his understanding of the plot, but of his understanding of where our continuing efforts to integrate with computers will take us. Today we already are facing many of the issues discussed in the book, like electronic privacy, intellectual property, and life in virtual environments, to name a few.
The book's philosophical base can also be a turn off to some readers, who might recognize the same symptoms of stagnation that plague the Golden Oecumene's citizens in themselves. Just like Phaeton, we are permitted by our civilization to choose a tranquil life of no consequence, where one day is just like the one before it, and a man can live his entire life and die without accomplishing a single thing. But Phaeton chooses the other path, to strive for greatness. At one point in the book he has an explicit choice to recover his memories, and I think that the inscription on the box that contains them applies to the book as well:
"Sorrow, great sorrow, and deeds of renown without peer, within me sleep, for truth is here. Truth destroys the worst in man; pleasure destroys the best. If you love truth more than happiness, then open; otherwise, let rest."
A little deep, but well worth the dive! November 16, 2007
I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I picked this up. I have to admit, the cover intrigued me, but at the same time it also was just a little cheesy in my mind. All that aside, it took my breath away, in the end. I say that because at first, I was in way over my head with all the scientific mumbo-jumbo Wright was throwing around. Nothing really wrong with it, it just took me a little bit to get accustomed to it. After I got used to the terminology, I really began to enjoy the book.
I definitely don't recommend this as the first Science Fiction book for someone to read. I think you need to be used to some of the "out there" concepts which are integrated into this book from the get-go.
I found myself completely captivated by Phaethon and the amazing complicated predicament he literally finds himself in as he attempts to discover why 250 years of his memory are missing...at his request! And I think Wright did an incredible job of introducing you to character unobtrusively and then "quietly" revealing them through the progress of the story.
Sad to say, this is the first of a trilogy of books, but from the other reviews I read, they are all worth the read. I do highly recommend this book to anyone daring to dive this deep into Science Fiction. But please, be forewarned, you're going to have to be able to digest some pretty abstract concepts to really enjoy this book.
Not Free SF Reader September 3, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
A novel set in the far, far future, where everyone is about as
posthuman as you can imagine. A little reminiscent of Moorcock's
Dancers at the End of Time, in tone, but with more obvious humanity and
human characters. It appears that the main character, now happily going
about his business, was some sort of maverick in the past. The current
group of people in power, including his father, removed a large chunk
of his memory. This is a long period of time, some centuries, are the
people in this era are functionally immortal.
He tries to find out why, and what he should do about it. He gets
into some serious amount of trouble as a destabilising influence in a
society that is being manipulated into stagnation by its masters.
 Great world-building. Too much Plot with a capital "P". August 8, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Wright is talented at world-building and actually fairly talented at characters as well. What he does less well, at least in this book, is provide a plot suitably subtle or integrated to support his skills in the other areas. Phaethon is a complex and interesting character; the choice to make him the center figure in a fight between the forces-of-Utopian-good-who-are-actually-just-trying-to-milk-humanity is extremely heavy-handed. It doesn't do credit to his own work. Section 3 of Chapter 1 irritated me so much (why not dress the Peers up in black hats and have them twirl their long waxed moustaches? "Adventures, risk, rashness must receive no further applause"-- oh, please.) that I almost didn't finish the book. In the end, I'm not sorry that I did finish it. But all the same, I find it irritating to be bludgeoned by an author's Point in the name of Plot.
Anyhow, this aside, there's some great stuff in here. I'm particularly fond of the way that he develops the future notions of identity. Great stuff to chew on, and combines thinking issues with futurism in the best tradition of Space Opera. Light reading it is not, so if you decide to give it a try, then give yourself some room and time to absorb the material.
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