Edge of Dark – The Glittering Edge #1 – Brenda Cooper

What if a society banished its worst nightmare to the far edge of the solar system, destined to sip only dregs of light and struggle for the barest living.  And yet, that life thrived?  It grew and learned and became far more than you ever expected, and it wanted to return to the sun.  What if it didn’t share your moral compass in any way?

The Glittering Edge duology describes the clash of forces when an advanced society that has filled a solar system with flesh and blood life meets the near-AI’s that it banished long ago.  This is a story of love for the wild and natural life on a colony planet, complex adventure set in powerful space stations, and the desire to live completely whether you are made of flesh and bone or silicon and carbon fiber.

In Edge of Dark, meet ranger Charlie Windar and his adopted wild predator, and explore their home on a planet that has been raped and restored more than once.  Meet Nona Hall, child of power and privilege from the greatest station in the system, the Diamond Deep.  Meet Nona’s best friend, a young woman named Chrystal who awakens in a robotic body….

Review:

I am usually very reluctant to read Space Operas. In general, they are just not for me. It’s strange because I do like them in tv/movies, just not in books. With ‘Edge of Dark’ I took a bit of a plunge in the unknown, searching for something new and exciting to cleanse my palet of epic/high fantasy. It definitely was not what I was expecting, but in a good way. The deeply ethical theme was probably what made me love this book so much. It really made me think, it made me question what I would do in situations presented in the book, how I would cope. It was an interesting journey that I’m happy I embarked on, even though I had my reservations.

The book is set in a post-apocalyptic sort of solar system. The Earth is uninhabitable, humans have colonised other planets and technology has advanced so far that it turned against them. We follow three people in very different situations. Charlie Windar lives on a colony planet and his main passion is preserving the last bits of biodiversity still alive on the planet, which is proving to be a very hard job indeed. When people start getting mysteriously murdered, things take a turn for the worse. Nona Hall lives on a huge space station, the Diamond Deep, and her best friend Chrystal works as a researcher on a space station near the edge of the solar system. Somewhere in the past of this book’s universe, AI-like robots created by humans developed autonomy and because this is quite scary (I think most people would agree), they were banned to the edge of the solar system. This is also basically the edge of civilisation, with barely any sunlight.

What already didn’t seem like a solid plan to me (banning intelligent robots in the hope they will just happily stay at the edge of civilisation for eternity?) turns out to be the start of an interesting confrontation between humanity and robots. The AIs attack the space station Chrystal works on, killing most people but capturing some, one of those being Chrystal. All of them undergo the same procedure: their ‘souls’, their ‘consciousness’, their ‘being’ gets transferred into a robot version of themselves. They are basically uploaded into a robot body. This is the first signal the robots send to tell the humans they want a place in civilisation, not at the edge. They are threatening a war and now humanity has to decide what they want to do: go to war, negotiate a truce or submit to become robots. Which one would you choose?

I already mentioned in the beginning of my review that the ethical questions really made the book for me. If your consciousness is uploaded in a robot, is it still you? Are you now suddenly an enemy to humanity or are you still their friend? Even though the uploading has a chance of failing, would you consider it to become immortal, to become stronger? How do you come to terms with the fact that your mind, your feelings, your memories are now uploaded in a robot and your human body is gone? Would you go to war to save humanity, risking many lives in the process without any guarantee of success? Or would you sacrifice some of your resources and try to live together peacefully, trusting the other party to stick to the truce? All of these questions are explored through the different characters and their viewpoints, showing how different factions within humanity collide based on their interpretation of what’s best.

‘Edge of Dark’ is a captivating book that had me on the edge of my seat. It has a frightening sense of familiarity to it, with the humans disagreeing about the best course of action, all absolutely convinced their approach is the best one. Even though this is science fiction, it seems eerily possible that a situation like this could arise in the future (not humans disagreeing, we’ve got plenty of that already…). That made the moral dilemmas all the more interesting to think about. Definitely recommended and can’t wait to read the second book in the duology!

Release date: March 3rd, 2015
Publisher: Pyr
Age Group:  Adult
Pages: 399
Format: Paperback
Source: Received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review