To Hold Infinity
John Meaney
paperback, 556 pages
Bantam books, 1998

"Dark, complex and glitters with brilliant strangeness...John Meaney has rewired SF. Everything is different now"

SUMMARY: Or so the cover blurb by Stephen Baxter would have it. This is, politely speaking, an overstatement. To Hold Infinity is a solid sf adventure novel, but is neither very original nor very insightful. In fact, the central idea which drives the plot is just a sf-take on a very old idea, more of which anon.

I got this book as a freebie at the 2000 Eastercon which, together with Baxter's blurb kept me from reading it until recently. I couldn't imagine it was a good book if Stephen "Mammoth" Baxter liked it. At the 2001 Eastercon however, John Meaney was present and proved to be quite a likeable guy, so I put To Hold Infinity on my to read stack. I'm glad I did.

It's sometime in the future and mankind has used mu-space to colonise various solar systems, one of which contains the planet Fulgor, which is home to an elite of upgraded humans called Luculenti. They've augmented their brains with computer modules called plexcores, which gives them neigh superhuman intelligence and all the mod cons that go with that.

A very recent upgrade is Tetsuo, an Earthling, whose upgrade was sponsored by the mysterious Rafael. When he cracks an illegally intercepted code message, he becomes the target of an assasination team and has to flee his home. Ufortunately he's too late to warn his mother, Yoshiko Sunadomari, who's traveling from Earth to Fulgor to visit him.

When she discovered Tetsuo is missing, presumed dead, she goes and investigate with the help of some friends, both Luculenti and Earthlings and crosses the path of Rafael...

Rafael turns out to be something I cannot call anything but a vampire, using the Luculentus technology and mindlinks to suck down the personality of his victims, using their plexcores to upgrade himself to a god like status.

As I stated earlier, the plot is solid adventure sf and not all that original. Meaney uses cyberpunk tropes and techniques to a great extent, portraying the Luculenti thought patterns and mind links by the usage of pseudocode. This works only partialy, as you never get to really imagine how it feels to be a Luculentus, but only the descriptions via said pseudocode. (Not too mention that it looks like some weird variant of C code...)

All in all, it's certainly not a bad book and a promising start for this new author. I'd be happy to read further books by him.