I just finished reading The Golden Age Trilogy by John C. Wright. An absolutely fabulous series. I read a fair amount of science fiction and I think I can spot a classic when I come across one. 'The Golden Age' is right up there with Frank Herbert's 'Dune', William Gibson's 'Neuromancer', and Olaf Stapledon's 'Starmaker'. Set 10,000 years in the future, it has more ideas packed into it than some authors put into a score of novels.

What does 10,000 years in the future look like? Well we have colonies on the Sun, Mercury and Neptune. Venus has been terraformed and moved back further in orbit. A fifth planet between Mars and Jupiter has been assembled from the asteroid belt. The moon is covered with cities and Jupiter has been ignited into a small star. While computers control 90% of all assets in the solar system, there are also modified humans living lives very different from our own. Some humans are just slight intellectual changes away from us like the invariants who think only in purely logical fashion, or the warlocks who have heightened their aesthetic sense and are masters of intuition. On the more extreme end of the scale, there are people who clone themselves and spread their consciousness out over hundreds of bodies, and the Neptunians, who think almost as fast as computers, routinely bud large sub brains, and live harsh lives on the fringes of the solar system.

With all the changes that Wright has envisioned in his world, the first hundred pages or so of the first book are very disorienting. Here is a sample conversation from the first pages of the first book between a Neptunian and the main character, a slightly modified human:

"I will attempt to convey my client's communication in a linear format, by means of words, but only on the understanding that much substantial content, and all secondary meanings, nuances, and connotations will be lost."

"I will be tolerant. Proceed."

"Very well. My client says: I (he forwards, as an appendix, a treatise on the meaning of the word 'I', the concept of selfhood, and bibliographical compendium of his experiences and changes in his self-notions in order to define this term to you) greet (he also has side comments on the history and nature of greetings, the implications in this context of what is meant, including the legal implications of violating the ban placed on his initatiing any contact with you) you (and he postulates a subjunctive inquiry that that, should you not be the individual that he deems you to be, that all thisbe placed in a secondary memory-chain, and be regarded as a less-than-real operation, similar to a pseudomnemia. He also requests sealed and notarized confirmation on his recorded memorandum documenting that you initiated the contact without his prompting)"

And here is our main character "roughing it" on a staircase in a tower that leads from the earth to an orbital platform:

His little encampment spread across the landing and up several steps. He accumulated enough carbon, nitrogen, and water vapour out of the air to combine amino acids in a life-filter he grew out of his cloak. He carpeted the landing with soft moss on which he could rest, and his vapor canister, converted to a condenser, and placed at the top stair, was able to put out a little streamlet of water. This trickled down the mossy stairs and into his helmet. Inside the helmet he had his nanomachines construct a nuclear recycler to break up the water, store the hydrogen, and release the fresh oxygen back into the atmosphere.

The control hierarchies within his armor would have had more than enough capacity to track and control this tiny plot of moss ten steps across; but Phaethon did not have a responder, and so there was no way for any command to reach from the suit-mind to the microorganisms. Phaethon had to content himself with a crude, old-fashioned binary chemical tag system, laoding each cell with viruses to disintegrate them if they passed outside the area, or a time or the behavior, defined by his preset chemical cues.

He folded himself in spun silk polymer sheets, and sat on other sheets inflated with air to form a pillow beneath. He propped the armor up, so it sat facing him, and the warmth of the glowing red breastplate and vambraces was like a camp stove.

There is a decent plot here too and a strong very forward theme on the need for courage and risk taking. The main character, Phaethon, is very much from the 'Golden Age' of SF, a similarity I am sure the authority was aware of. Unlike today's typical morally ambiguous, emotionally uncertain protagonist, the main character here is unfearing, uncompromisingly ethical, and rational to a tee. Of course the reason for this is that his father designed him that way.

This is a wonderful saga. Beyond the disorientation from all the technological onslaught, some people may be put off by the stilted dialogue and the lessons from Philosophy 101, but this is worth the effort, and I have very little doubt that people will be still be talking about it twenty years from now.