I’ve done a couple of posts on Robert Reed’s Greatship series, about a giant spherical Uranus-sized megastructure moving through space at a third the speed of light. It’s discovered in intergalactic space and claimed by humans, who then invite anyone who can pay in some manner (resources, technology, science, or even just interesting stories) to join on a cruise around the Milky Way. A huge population of humans and aliens take them up on it. But as the series progresses, a number of things go wrong and the humans lose control of the Greatship.
The Dragons of Marrow and Hammerwing take place long after the stories in the early novels, aeons after. The captains who once ruled the ship have retreated to Marrow, the planet at the center of the ship. There they have withstood many wars from the aliens who seized control of the outer ship. But it’s been a very long time since the last attack, and no one knows what the state of the outer ship is, or of the overall universe outside of it.
Every few million years Marrow expands to the full size of the cavern it’s in and is hammered back down through fire by the mechanisms in that cavern, a process which destroys the surface. To survive, people and resources are stored in vaults made of a substance known as hyperfiber, the strongest material in the universe because it spans the multiverse and so is reinforced by all the versions of itself. The vaults are sunk into the molten mantle of Marrow.
After a cycle when Marrow is driven down by the forces in the cavern, vaults bubble up and survivors are able to re-colonize the world, although which vaults surface is always a random process. Some may miss one or more cycles. And it’s not unusual for vaults to fail, fully or partially.
But some characters have attained an ability that allows them to survive, even without the vaults. However, if any of these individuals are killed, it immediately causes the destruction of the current Marrow and an early end to the cycle. These individuals are known as “dragons”, and they seem to be composed of the most prominent characters from the earlier stories, with one notable exception. Each dragon generally rules a nation on Marrow.
Becoming a dragon seems to involve being on the surface of Marrow in the final moments of its cycle, perhaps as either the final living thing or one of the last ones. Interestingly, achieving this anywhere in the quantum multiverse seems to mean that you can return and interact with others on Marrow from other universes. Marrow seems to be a place where the universes blend together. Although the exact mechanisms remain unclear, it enables characters who died earlier in the series to return. (And fixes the continuity issues I mentioned in my first Marrow post.)
A typical conceit of space opera is that faster than light travel is possible. Instead, Reed enables his interstellar civilization with the idea that immortality is a solvable engineering problem. In these later books, we see this taken to its extreme. The original characters are now immensely old, and can’t remember much of their own history anymore. Which means there are now mysteries about that history that even they don’t know. It’s an interesting take on how things could develop over vast stretches of time.
Into all this comes a boy named Diamond and his group of friends from another world, a world explored in the novel: A Memory of Sky. They emerge onto Marrow from what appears to be an advanced vault of some type, but it gradually becomes evident that it’s something far more advanced and mysterious, an artefact which either contains or has access to a multitude of other worlds. Diamond and his friends turn out to have connections with the dragons and wider universe.
The story in Dragons is continued in Hammerwing. Together they form a fairly cohesive story, although one that largely ends on a cliffhanger.
Reed, in the introduction to these books, warns that they are for committed readers, and he’s not kidding. These are not the books you want to start with. I recommend starting with The Greatship story collection, and moving forward from there. There’s just too much backstory.
That said, I actually made a decision to see if I could skip A Memory of Sky, which is usually listed after The Well of Stars and before Dragons in the series lineup. From the description, A Memory sounded long and didn’t have any of the regular characters from the earlier stories. And the reviews were pretty rough. Skipping it did make the first chapter of Dragons confusing, but things got better in the second chapter as the old characters start showing up.
As usual with Reed, these books have a lot of interesting ideas, mind candy for those of us into this sort of thing. But also as usual, the writing can be pretty rough, even more so since these are self published, and he seems to be doing them primarily to take care of longtime fans. So he’s not worrying about flashy covers or professional editing. The result are books that I think could stand to be tightened substantially, and each with their share of typos. But if you’ve read the series this far, that’s all baked in, and the payoff is worth it.
It sounds like Reed plans two more books in this series, and seems to be averaging five years between them. Hammerwing came out in 2023, so I’m anticipating a wait for the next one. He has a large number of additional novellas and short stories in this universe, although most seem set in the earlier eras. I’ve read some and plan to read others, particularly since it’s in the short form that Reed really seems able to shine.
Reed isn’t for everyone, but if these ideas sound interesting, he’s worth checking out.
SelfAwarePatterns 