Gary K Bibliophile's Reviews > The Dreaming Void

4.5 ⭐️‘s rounded up. The Dreaming Void is the first of what seems to be a promising trilogy. It’s part of a longer series of books dealing with The Commonwealth. Although I should have read the earlier ones in the series ahead of time - I had become impatient with my library ignoring my *recommend* request 😀 - a little research showed I would be ok not reading them in order and I was able to follow along with the story in this pretty well. There were references to things like “The Starflyer War” and events that sounded pretty cool that I could tell were in the other books, but I was able to keep up. If anything it makes me want to read these even more.

The setting is in the far future... the 35th century. There is a mysterious section of of the galaxy dubbed The Void that shows the characteristics of black hole. Like most black holes it kind of sucks up all matter near it in a not so pleasant way. As it turns out - this one is a bit different... there’s people in there. There is a character from our universe named Inigo (no... his last name is not Montoya... but someone did kill the father of the object of his dreams). Inigo starts having visions (or dreams) about a civilization that exists inside The Void. These dreams inspire over a century’s time a movement called The Living Dream that tries to interpret the meaning of the dreams. This group - 5 billion strong - is effectively a religious movement. One of the key plot points of the book is that they decide to make a pilgrimage to The Void. Inigo’s idea? No - he’s disappeared from the spotlight.

Seems harmless... right? Well - for those not going on the pilgrimage - sure. Those going into the black hole are probably not going to be so lucky. Non human groups (and some humans too) think this is not such a great idea. One of the other groups called the Raiel have first hand experience of what happens when you try to enter The Void... basically everyone trying dies and an acceleration of the devourment of the universe occurs. Faced with scientific evidence of the consequences the Living Dream abandons their plans.

I’m just kidding... remember it’s humans we are talking about. They dismiss the Raiel’s objections in a very xenophobic way and decide to go ahead with their plans anyway. The Raiel are an ancient civilization - extremely advanced - and see us as very primitive. If you have ever watched the TV series Babylon-5 (highly recommended) they are like the Vorlons (not physically - but how they regard humans)

Parts of the story take place in our universe and others are a slow unveiling of Inigo’s dreams and the civilization inside The Void. There are a lot of characters and several plot lines to follow.

Ok - that’s as much of the plot as I’m going to divulge - I don’t want to throw too many spoilers out there. I will however go into some of the cool future-tech. Like I was saying - we are in the 35th century - the iPhone 2700 has just been released, AOL is making a comeback, and George R R Martin’s descendants have finally released the last Game of Thrones book... ok - none of that’s true, but here’s a sampling of cool Commonwealth tech that is in the book.
- Biononics - this tech allows you alter your characteristics. You can be taller, stronger, change your hair, set your own age... become a hard to stop killing machine (there may be one of those in the book 😀) The enhancements are so pervasive most people have no idea what anyone looks like.
- U-Shadow - this is kind of a digital assistant which is a copy of yourself. Think of it as a souped up version of Syri/Alexa, but it works reliably (those things never understand me). Rather than ask it simple question like “what’s the weather today?” You can give it complex tasks like to go do research on a topic... it will do the task just like if you did it yourself- send the results right into your brain- and free you up to do whatever you want.
- ANA or advanced neural activity system is a massive electronic collective brain of sorts that you can download your personality into or create alternative copies of yourself. Not good for privacy 🤔
- Cure for death... well - not exactly. That personality you can upload - it has memories too - so if you die you can just get downloaded from your last backup copy in a new body... it only takes a few months. What if your body is just getting old and wearing out? Same thing.. . Just replicate yourself in a new one... with biononics you can make yourself look just like you did before. This leads to most people living hundreds of years.
- Multiple’s... is having an immortal presence and a U-Shadow to do all the hard stuff for you just not enough for you? There’s a solution... become a ‘multiple’ This means there can be 20 physical copies of you - all different in appearance- that share the same consciousness - talk about multi-tasking. I wonder how they would do with the ‘Invisible Gorilla’ experiment.
- The spaceships are pretty cool too of course- especially Aaron’s 🚀

So what about the cool tech for the civilization inside The Void? That’s a completely different story. These people seem to have at one point had been very advanced, but had a decline - so there are carryovers of the old technology- but overall they are quite primitive. That doesn’t make them less interesting. Telekinesis and telepathy are quite common. Some gifted individuals are so talented they can ‘egg shape’ and effectively alter the DNA of growing eggs and create new creatures to perform tasks. The morality of that is disturbing- especially considering that there are so many failed attempts at this, but it’s fascinating.

Overall I found this quite good. I struggled to keep up with the plethora of characters at times, but that’s ok. There were a lot of loose ends and unexplained things that I’m sure will play out in the next two books. Also, since it kind of ended on a cliff hanger it left me wanting more.