Into Everywhere by Paul McAuley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an extremely fascinating SF novel that does more for fans of SF in general than 200 of its ilk.

What do I mean?

It not only has a very cool Tomb Raider type story with a ton of alien ghosts (or ghosts in the machine) weird AI or virus type aliens, and 15 gifted worlds for humans to do as they please, but it also is a novel that is one huge, ongoing easter egg for FANS of SF.

By no means is this a hard-to-follow novel if you don't get all the references. It just means you'll be awash in wonderful and strange ideas, often in the background, but sometimes up in your face. Wormhole networks, ancient aliens, and inscrutable truly-alien aliens that have learned US so freakishly well that they fit right in without ever (or mostly never) show their true colors.

What kind of species would ever just GIVE AWAY fifteen star systems to us? The Jackaroo is as much a mystery as the alien ghosts or the Elder tech.

What we have here is a very interesting archeological (or rather less official) series of adventures that are far from being formulaic. Indeed, the characters are fascinatingly complex and in to0 deep. :)

You can read this as a standalone, but I would recommend reading Something Coming Through first. I'm very impressed with this SF, either way. The devil is in the details and I absolutely adored the worldbuilding.


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