You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.īut you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them.” * You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. And you send a synthesist - an informational topologist with half his mind gone - as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths.

You send a pacifist warrior whose career-defining moment was an act of treason. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultra-sound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a linguist with multiple personalities carved surgically into her brain. “Who you do send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? The crew is unlike any other you’ve ever met in a story, I guarantee you that think of strange and multiply it tenfold. Later on, as the third wave, Theseus, a ship captained by an AI and having a human (and not only) crew is sent to investigate further. Some probes are sent to investigate a signal apparently coming from Burns-Caulfield comet, located in the Kuiper Belt. The quest in pursuing why/who/what sent them begins. Humanity is caught off guard and reactions are all over the spectrum. : Earth is surrounded by 65,000 alien objects, named Fireflies which after a little while, burned in atmosphere. But this duology was the most dense and tough I had read so far. I’ve had my fair share of sci-fi works, with mind-blowing ideas and, at times, with worlds and concepts hard to imagine. Note: links inserted in the review contain minor spoilers. For fans of this series, fresh, just out of the oven:

Blindsight watts