I won’t bore you with all the reasons you’re getting another retro review.
Charles Sheffield is one of those authors I’m fond of. I’ve even read most of his work, but I have not reviewed that much of it.
From July 28, 2003 …
Review: Resurgence, Charles Sheffield, 2002.
In the fifth novel of the Heritage Universe, the Builders, those aliens who scattered around huge, occasionally useful, sometimes deadly, artifacts about our part of the galaxy, have competition. Another force is destroying their work and sucking the heat and life out of entire solar systems.
Troubleshooter Hans Rebka, obsessed Builder scholar Darya Lang, the shady team of Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial, their strangely loyal slaves, the exuberant and impatient E. C. Tally (an embodied computer), and Ethical Counselor Julian Graves again find themselves exploring the Builders’ works and speculating as to what they mean.
This may be the most humorous book of the series, and the characters are at their most interesting. The action set pieces in frozen solar systems are inventive and suspenseful.
This is not a good entry point for the series, though. You’ll want to follow the enigma of the Builders from the beginning starting with Sheffield’s Convergent series and then Transvergence.
And, unfortunately, with Sheffield’s death, some Builder questions will remain unanswered.
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MarzAat 