I spent most of the weekend finishing The Sigil Trilogy, by Henry Gee.
This is a complex and brave set of books. Â Classic SF in every sense of the word. Â Henry follows multiple time lines, with the primary story set in our near future. Â He takes archaeology and astronomy, far-flung space travel, and an alien race and uses them to create a true sense-of-wonder world.
I found it really hard to put down. Â The Sigil Trilogy asks and offers answers for big questions, contains gosh-wow ideas, and gosh-wow science.
I fell in love with his main characters in the near future time frame. Â We first meet them as young archaeologists, and follow them through major discoveries. Â I truly loved every main character in this group, and found them to be larger-than-life and yet subtly human all at once. Endearing. Â Henry is an editor at Nature Magazine, and his knowledge of the scientific community comes through really well.
The book also flips through some far-past time frames.  If there was any fault for me with the book, it was that the far-past time frames were less interesting to me than the main story, and so I often grew impatient while reading those chapters.  It was also a bit tough to enter – the opening confused me (at first), and a few other scenes seemed unnecessary  (I can’t chat about them without spoilers).  But entirely in spite of those (rather small) problems, I found myself stuck to my iPad screen much longer than I planned to be more than once, and on both weekend days I woke up and dove right back into the trilogy instead of my usual routine of reading the New York Times with my coffee.
I really admire the reach of these books, and the many subtle and excellent nuances in the writing. Â It’s classic-SF award-worthy.
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Thanks for the reco. I had no idea Gee had written SF!