- Marrow (novel)
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Marrow 
Author(s) Robert Reed Country United States Language English Genre(s) Science fiction novel Publisher Tor Books Publication date 2000 Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) Pages 351 pp ISBN 0-312-86801-4 OCLC Number 43615783 Dewey Decimal 813/.54 21 LC Classification PS3568.E3696 M37 2000 Followed by The Well of Stars Marrow is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Reed that was first published in 2000. It has received significant critical acclaim.
Contents
Plot introduction
From the furthest and most empty regions of the universe comes a vessel larger than any other. In a distant future, humans from the planet Earth manage to enter and explore the enormous ship. Humans by this point are genetically engineered to be nearly immortal. Each cell of their being contains all their memories, and they do not age, allowing them to live aboard the ship for centuries. The vessel is older than anyone can imagine, 5 billion to 15 billion years old. It is also immense, the size of a large gas-giant planet, but filled with interior chambers. The humans settle down and invite alien species to join them for a considerable fee. Together they embark upon a journey circumnavigating the Milky Way, but in the meantime, strange things begin to occur deep within. At the heart of the ship is a planet, and a mystery.
Plot summary
In the future, with a space-travel-ready Earth, a massive artificially created planet is detected entering the Galaxy. Human technology has advanced to the point of near immortality, where even a single cell contains all the memories of a person, and can be used to reconstruct them if they should die. Humans are the first to intercept and investigate the planet. It is made from nearly indestructible materials woven at a subatomic level, and is in fact a ship, larger than many gas-giant planets. Its course will take it briefly through the Milky Way and then back out into deep space. Boarding the ship, the humans simply lock the ship doors and wait as many alien species attempt to board the ship as well, to no avail. Most known weapons are useless against the ship's advanced hull, anti-matter being one of the few weapons with any potential effect.
As time passes, humans eventually decide to turn the ship into a sort of traveling cruise/trade depot, and invite many other races to join them in the massive interior of the ship - much of which lies uncharted. Thousands of years pass as the great ship makes its slow circumnavigation of the Milky Way, and eventually there are over 200 billion creatures living in its upper levels. Lower in the ship exist strange things, seas of water, ammonia, and other vast oddities. And something much odder still: at the core of the planet is a geologically active world of its own - Marrow. A group of explorers establish a bridge to Marrow, and searches the newfound world of rock and molten iron, but an ionic blast destroys much of their technology and likewise the bridge which connects the ship to the planet's surface. All is well, however, as they calculate that Marrow is slowly expanding, and in another 5,000 years they will be able to reach the ship's walls if they can manage to build a new bridge. The explorers begin to start a new civilization on the surface of the planet, but strange things begin to happen.
Many of the explorers' descendants come to believe that they are the Builders, and become obsessed with someone or something called the Bleak. What is more, one of the descendants has discovered a pod of the ship's indestructible material which can dive into the molten depths of Marrow, and what he found in those depths changes him forever. When Marrow expands to its limits, the descendants, now calling themselves the Wayward and believing themselves to be the enemies of the Bleak, start a mutiny to take control of the ship. Convinced that the Bleak are in the ship and ready to escape, the Waywards steer the ship towards a black hole. One of the explorers discovers the truth, however, in a vision of the distant past, when the ship was made. The Bleak are a race of nearly unstoppable insect-like creatures, vastly unlike anything the universe now contains. The Builders fought the Bleak back with massive armies of robotic warriors, and contained them in a world of iron and an inexhaustible reactor system, and then built the ship as a prison about that world. The Bleak, buried at the heart of Marrow, have twisted the Waywards, and it becomes clear that if the ship is destroyed by the black hole, the Bleak will be freed.
The explorers begin a revolution of their own, involving the help of Remoras - a group of intrepid engineers who live on the surface of the ship, and whose mutations are a mark of pride (born of the radiation they receive unshielded on the outer surface of the ship). Using anti-matter weaponry and cunning, they manage to undermine large sections of the ship's control and command systems, diverting the engines' thrust and changing their trajectory just enough to skim past the black hole.
As the book ends we are presented with an intriguing puzzle. The explorers confront a group of AI robots, who are masters of deduction and reasoning, and posit a question. If Marrow is a prison for the Bleak, and the ship an extension of that prison, is it possible that the Builders did not stop there? Could it be that they created the universe around the ship as well, so that the Bleak are trapped in infinitely receding layers of an inescapable jail?
With that the AI are left to wonder, and the book ends.
Reviews and criticism
While many readers had generally positive reactions to the novel, many criticisms were drawn. Some reviewers argue that the novel, while grand in premise ends up muddled. Many note that Robert Reed visited on the "Marrow" planet-ship concept in three of his earlier works, "The Remoras", "Aeon's Child", and a short by the same name. Critics felt that Reed originally invented Marrow as a simple backdrop for his other stories, and his attempts to flesh it out in "Marrow" fell short.[1] Other critics too felt that the novel had too many scientific errors to be true sci-fi, and would be better classified as sci-fantasy.[2] Nevertheless, most reviewers agreed that the book is entertaining and novel in its scope and premise. Reed himself defends his non-strict approach to science in his sci-fi writings, and seems to have intentionally left much of his work in the realm of fantasy [3].
Sequels
The sequel to Marrow is The Well of Stars (2004).
Translations
- French: "Le Grand vaisseau" ("The Great Ship"), Bragelonne, 2006, ISBN 2-995549-68-0
- Russian: "Жизненная сила" ("The Vital Force"), AST, 2003, ISBN 5-17-016662-1.
- Spanish: Médula ("Marrow"), La Factoría de Ideas, 2007, ISBN 84-9800-254-0
External links
References
Categories:- 2000 novels
- American science fiction novels
- Novels by Robert Reed
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