The Golden Age Reviews

All reviews are the copyrighted work of their respective authors.

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(Publishers Weekly)

-Nick Gevers (Locus Magazine)

-Paul Di Filippo (Science Fiction Weekly)

-Gregory Deych (Amazon.com review)

Hugo/Nebula contender (and likely winner)

... _The Golden Age_ is one of the most original novels to come out in years. John Wright lays out and tosses away more inventive, imaginative ideas in a few pages than many SF authors manage in a whole book. And not only has he developed a long-term extrapolation of human/technical evolution, he has done so in a story built on various intersections of myth and philosophy.
.... He never forgets the need to be a good storyteller, yet probes close to the bone on such core issues as the determination of truth, the nature of reality and the tension between individual freedom and social good.
Utterly outstanding. ....

-Bruce F. Webster (Amazon.com review)

Pure mental exhilaration. Ideas enough for 20 novels.

If this book were titled "Brilliant new ideas for SF writers" and simply listed alphabetically the ideas Wright packs into his story it would still be worth the money. There are single paragraphs in "The Golden Age" which contain more original concepts than the entire works of other SF writers. I had the distinct sense that Wright has had a very pregnant mind for far too long and that finally writing everything down was an incredible release for him. This all begs the obvious question: What hideous ogre has kept him off the shelves? Why are we shackled with "Picard Gets a Hangnail, Part IV" when we could have books like the "The Golden Age"? Someone in the publishing world needs to be fired. ...Wright is so comfortable and fluent with his ideas you get the impression he's not extrapolating so much as explaining the world in which he lives.

(Amazon.com review)

In a future where humans, artificial personalities, and other exotic life forms coexist in the now-settled solar system, Phaethon, a scion of Radamanthus House, discovers that sometime in his past his memories had been locked away from him and that his familiar identity is a false one. Driven to discover his true history and his real name, Phaethon journeys across the solar system, seeking answers among human immortals, intelligent machines, and digital personalities among others. Bursting with kaleidoscopic imagery, Wright's first novel chronicles the quest of a far-future everyman in his journey of self-discovery. Reminiscent of the panoramic novels of Arthur C. Clarke, Iain Banks, and Jack Vance, this allegorical space opera belongs in most sf collections. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

(Library Journal)

Reading John C. Wright's first novel, The Golden Age, is like coming to the edge of a great precipice, looking down into total blackness, and then stepping off -- only to be fully immersed a second later in a brilliant new universe of surreal illusions and ever-changing reality.

From the very first sentences, I was fully absorbed in the grand Millennial Celebration, which takes place more than 10,000 years in the future. "It was a time of masquerade. It was the eve of the High Transcendence, an event so solemn and significant that it could be held but once each thousand years, and folk of every name and iteration, phenotype, composition, consciousness and neuro-form, from every school and era, had come to celebrate its coming, to welcome the transfiguration, and to prepare."

An interplanetary utopian society stretches across the solar system. Humans, for the most part, are immortal. It is paradise. Phaethon is attending a party to celebrate the anniversary of the High Transcendence, when he meets a mountainous Neptunian who claims to be an old friend. The Neptunian tells Phaethon that parts of his memory have been removed and are being kept somewhere by the government. Intuitively, Phaethon trusts the stranger and vows to recover his past. His dangerous journey will lead him across the solar system, and to his true identity.

The Golden Age is much more than an epic space adventure; it's an ambitious, deep book that is comparable in style and scope to Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.

-Paul Goat Allen (The Barnes & Noble Review)

-Harriet Klausner, Resident Scholar, John C. Wright "Fan Club" (allscifi.com)