For a book called 'Permanence' (paperback, March 2003), it's all change in Karl Schroeder's first venture into space opera, crammed with very bright ideas, races against time and another go at one of science fiction's big questions: if we're not alone, how come space isn't teeming with civilisations?
Most of them got wiped out.
Scientist Laurent Herat has spent much of his life studying the ruins of alien cultures, with his assistant Michael Besquith, who also happens to be an undercover Neo-Shinto monk.
Humanity has populated vast tracts of what's out there, but the only surviving alien species encountered are totally uninterested in contact, let alone cooperation.

Rue Cassels, daring her valiant getaway from an abusive brother and an appalling aunt on a backward mining station, strikes lucky with a major discovery on her way to the nearest planet around the dwarf star that is all she has known for a sun. She stakes a salvage claim to an abandoned, silent "cycler", one of the vast and slow vessels that link the "halo" worlds.
Schroeder's threads begin to draw together, the military is swiftly involved, and Rue and an unexpected benefactor in her family circle are caught in a battle to gain and keep control of her starship and a struggle between the Cycler Compact and the Rights Economy of the "lit" worlds, who have faster-than-light travel.
The Rights Economy has driven religion underground, including the non-theistic kind, and masters nanotechnology, one of the key ideas in Schroeder's equally rich and dense debut novel, 'Ventus' (reviewed on my blog last June). In 'Permanence', however, nano is largely about labelling, price, payment and enforcement.
The Cycler Compact, by contrast, relies on trade in goods, ideas and information.
At the cost of a more Manichean development of his characters — pretty clear-cut heros and villains — than in the first book, Karl develops a deft political subtext as fitting for our own times as it is for his far future. Mostly he keeps it under the surface.

A different kind of writing needs deciphering on Jentry's Envy, the name Rue takes from her brother for the ship that could propel her into the elite ranks of the Cycler Captains.
The scientists come into their own with this challenge, not just the experts in xenobiology and linguistics, but a bunch of brains, set to be roped, sometimes kicking and rebelling, into Schroeder's imaginative variations on the tug of war between fascinating theory and fearsome technological application.
Jentry's Envy is alien.
It will take Rue's quick wits and tough guts, Herat's experience and Mike's grasp of alien psychology — which has plunged him deep into a kind of "dark night of the soul" as a result of his efforts to capture the "kami" (or recorded essences) of otherness — to unravel the cycler's secrets.
It could also take something even harder to obtain: alien help. In a vast void of indifference.