The Omega Expedition

Fans of vast, epic future histories in science fiction will undoubtedly appreciate Brian Stableford's concluding volume in his look at near-immortality for humanity, "The Omega Expedition". This is a good luck at human aging and how it is defeated successfully by a post-human culture in the solar system more than a thousand years in the future. However, stylistically as a writer, Stableford falls short of such distinguished fellow Britons as Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldis, and China Mieville. Even Bruce Sterling had a more fascinating, more intriguing look at humanity's struggle against the ravages of aging in his splendid novel "Holy Fire". Stableford's latest describes the travails and successes awaiting Madoc Tamlin, who awakes a thousand years after being frozen, unwitting finding himself on the front-line of a Solar System war between different factions of artificial machine intelligences. Still, this is a captivating novel of ideas worth reading by science fiction fans.