The Golden Age
The Golden Age: A Romance of the Far Future.
Locus Award nominee 2003.
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.
The Golden Age takes place 10,000 years in the future in our solar system, an
interplanetary utopian society filled with immortal humans. Within the
frame of a traditional tale – the one rebel who is unhappy in
utopia – Wright spins an elaborate plot web filled with suspense and
passion.
Phaethon, of Radamanthus House, is attending a glorious
party at his family mansion to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary
of the High Transcendence. There he meets first an old man who accuses
him of being an impostor and then a being from Neptune who claims to be
an old friend. The Neptunian tells him that essential parts of his
memory were removed and stored by the very government that 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 that are partly both, to recover his memory, and to
learn what crime he planned that warranted 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 writer in the genre.
John C. Wright
John C. Wright is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was born 1961. He is a retired attorney, newspaperman and newspaper editor.
The Golden Age
The Golden Age consists of three books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.