by Tony Daniel
(Metaplanetary) A junior partner in Teleman Milt.
The Old Man
(Metaplanetary) LAP head of Teleman Milt.
Lloyd Njonjo
An old classmate of Kelly’s from business school and a conservative councilman in the New Miranda government. He got Kelly a job with the newly formed Solarian Republic War Bank.
Danis Graytor-Related
Sarah 2
Free convert who chose to be Danis Graytor’s mother.
Sarah 1
Free convert who chose not to be Danis Graytor’s mother.
Dr. Ting
Mengele-like psychologist in Silicon Valley.
Lyre Wing
(Metaplanetary) Free convert, looked upon as something of a floozy by Danis’s mother’s friends.
Readymark
(Metaplanetary) Free-convert friend of Danis’s mother.
Vida
(Metaplanetary) Free-convert friend of Danis’s mother.
Appendix Eleven
METAPLANETARY–SUPERLUMINAL HISTORICAL TIME LINE
YEAR
EVENT
TECHNOLOGY
ARTS
2300s
Legal strictures of the late 2300s and early 2400s lead to the Information Consortiums of the 2400s C.E., and to the genesis of the ECHO Alliance.
Information Age fully realized. Biotech matures.
Zen-Lutheranism founded.
2375
Cloudship Lebedev born in Russia.
Small human presence in Earth orbit and on Earth’s moon.
Old religions rapidly cycle through fundamentalism to apostasy and back again.
2400s
Consortium of trans-national information brokers rules on Earth. Growth and commerce, though sluggish, are generally steady. For the arts and sciences, however, it is an era of stagnation and malaise. In the arts, the 2400s are known as the Ironic Age.
Ironic Age. Senescence of many artistic forms and genres. Many faiths die out.
2412
ECHO Alliance rules Earth.
2459
Tacitus and Lebedev’s human aspects meet in old Farside Station on the Earth’s Moon.
2465
Initial construction on the Met begins.
Nanotech Age dawns.
2475
Construction on the Aldiss, the first space cable, complete.
Humanity moves into the solar system.
Greentree Way evolves from Zen-Lutheranism and the New Shamanism on Earth’s Moon. Faith and science reunite.
2500s
Bradbury University’s greatest period throughout 2500s. Flare Generation, group of poets who published in Beat Myers’s journal.
2511
Raphael Merced born, the first major scientist who is not an Earthling, and who belongs in the pantheon of such figures as Newton, Einstein, and Galileo. Amanda Breadwinner, first Met Chief Engineer, retires.
Poetry reemerges as major form.
2590
The Exiles’ Journey created—a compendium of essays, thoughts, and sayings by the artists and scientists who ran afoul of the Mercurian Endowment government in the 2590s—as they plunge into the sun.
Quantum Age dawns.
The Awakening. Rebirth and reformation of many of the arts.
2700s
Era of disastrous Mars terraforming experiments. Cloudships began to be recognized as such.
Nanotech Age matures.
Musical high tide.
2802
The Earth declared an “Ecological Repatriation Area” with limited construction and population growth allowed; vast stretches of planet returned to natural state.
Solar system fully settled.
Composers, virtual reality virtuosos dominate.
2823
The Dark Matter Road, a stretch of unreflective material that lies between the solar system and the double-starred Centauri System, discovered.
Age of Art and Grist. Full flower of the Awakening.
2903
Cloudship Mark Twain becomes the first human being to visit another solar system when he arrives at Alpha Centauri.
2914
Cloudship Lebedev arrives at Alpha Centauri.
2963
The most important Conjubilation of the Mars-Earth Diaphany in history, including the famous (and infamous) Merge gathering.
New Hierarchy, transformed socialism, emerges.
3013
Cloudships adopt the Metaplanetary Constitution of the Solarian Republic. War for Republic begins.
Superluminal Age dawns.
War.
About the Author
TONY DANIEL is the author of the novels Earthling and Warpath, along with the pioneering and well-received Metaplanetary, to which Superluminal is a sequel. Daniel heads up the New York City theater troupe Automatic Vaudeville, which produces independent films. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter. You can visit his website at www.metaplanetary.com.
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TONY DANIEL
“One of the fastest rising new stars.”
Gardner Dozois
SUPERLUMINAL
“One of the year’s more intriguing novels so far.”
Locus
“[A] fascinating future world, which encompasses some of the best science fiction has to offer, along the lines of E.E. ‘Doc’Smith, Greg Bear, and Bruce Stirling. And it isn’t absolutely necessary to have read the previous volume, Metaplanetary, which set the stage for this conflict between the inner- and outer-worlds.”
Starlog
“An awesome vision of the future… [A] large-scale space opera with an enormous cast, spectacular battle scenes…There’s much to like here.”
Publishers Weekly
“Daniel’s imagined future culture is as complex and innovative as any in SF, and the sequel defies tradition by being much better than its predecessor…Far and away the author’s best book to date.”
SF Chronicle
Books by Tony Daniel
SUPERLUMINAL
METAPLANETARY
EARTHLING
WARPATH
THE ROBOT ’ S TWILIGHT COMPANION
(Short Stories)
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SUPERLUMINAL. Copyright © 2004 by Tony Daniel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
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* For a layman’s account, see Leo Y. Sherman, Quartermain’s Guide: The Advantages of the Strong Force: A Guide to and History of the Met , in which Sherman argues that the first sophisticated quantum computers were suppressed by one of the giant software concerns of the twenty-first century for nearly fifty e-years because of those computers’ ability to run an infinite number of competing operating systems simultaneously.
