Noumenon Infinity
By Marina J. Lostetter
ISBN # 9780062497871
Author’s Website: www.lostetter.net
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
Summary: 
Travel to the remotest reaches of deep space in this wondrous follow-up to the acclaimed Noumenon—a tale of exploration, adventure, science, and humanity with the sweep and intelligence of the works of Arthur C. Clarke, Neal Stephenson, and Octavia Butler.
Generations ago, Convoy Seven and I.C.C. left Earth on a mission that would take them far beyond the solar system. Launched by the Planet United Consortium, a global group formed to pursue cooperative Earth-wide interests in deep space, nine ships headed into the unknown to explore a distant star called LQ Pyx.
Eons later, the convoy has returned to LQ Pyx to begin work on the Web, the alien megastructure that covers the star. Is it a Dyson Sphere, designed to power a civilization as everyone believes—or something far more sinister?
Meanwhile, Planet United’s littlest convoy, long thought to be lost, reemerges in a different sector of deep space. What they discover holds the answers to unlocking the Web’s greater purpose.
Each convoy possesses a piece of the Web’s puzzle . . . but they may not be able to bring those pieces together and uncover the structure’s true nature before it’s too late.
Review
“Reggie continued, ‘The pursuit of knowledge is in its own way a spiritual undertaking. It’s good for the soul, or whatever you want to call that innate thing that makes us reach. Whether reaching within for the courage to comprehend ourselves, or into the great beyond in order to comprehend everything else, the endeavor is what makes us who and what we are.
So . . . never stop wondering. Never stop learning. Never stop being grateful for your chance to explore. I’m grateful that you can chase my dream, that you can further our understanding.’”
Noumenon Infinity is a story about time and space, and what it is to have the legacy and weight of your world upon you. It’s a bundle of stories across time and different places that together form the next length of the adventure that started on Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter.
The reader follows the lives of the crew members of two different Convoys in space as they try to complete the missions that were given to them. The first, is Convoy Seven who is the second generation to the crew members that readers meet in the book Noumenon, this Convoy has for mission to return to the star LQ Pyx and complete the work in finish of the Web, and alien megastructure that might have the key to a massive amount of energy for Earth to use. They also have a secret mission of learning everything they can about the mysterious alien species that created the Web and didn’t complete it, the Nataré as they call them.
The second story follows the crew members of Convoy Twelve, a convoy that had for a mission to complete their research and experiment of the SD (Subdimensional) Drives for better understanding and use of space travel. Convoy Twelve had for nickname “the littlest” as is was not supposed to follow the other convoy to LQ Pyx, but instead stay in the Solar system. After a tragic accident with a malfunctioning SD drive, Convoy Twelve that consisted of the ships, Breath, Pulse, and Life are ripped off time and space and are lost in a different place and time that they originally were. It’s now up to the crew members and Dr. Vanhi Kapoor, who is in charge of the mission, to find where they are and try to survive stranded in the middle of nowhere with some looming ships that seem to be observing them.
I liked Noumenon Infinity, I liked the genre of Science Fiction, but I was a little intimidated by the synopsis of the book and the type of scientific topics that it mentioned. After reading the first chapter I realized that the story is much more than science and space travel, it’s about the crew members and the decision they take. The author did a great job with the POVs of the different characters and how she changes them across the timeline.
Time is a character that has a strong presence in this story. The characters have for a mission to travel to a star that’s light years away and a normal human couldn’t do that trip, for that the mission uses clones. We meet many iterations of those clones across the story, but each one with their own personality and ideas. It’s easy to get into the timeline while following the storyline, but the author helps a lot by adding time dates to the start of each chapter and by the names of the clones.
“Convoy Seven
Eight Hundred and Fifty-Five Years Since Jamal the Eighteenth’s Engineering Discovery
March 13, 1079 Relaunch
6666 CE”
While I liked the story and the characters, and I was able to follow the storyline, I believe it could have been easier if I had read the previous book, Noumenon first. The story mentions events from the previous book that has a great impact on the characters and their decisions. The author supplies some information to help the reader, but I think reading the other book would have helped better.
I know that not all questions can be answered in a story of this magnitude that expands across of thousands of years, but I was left with wanting to know more of the alien life’s that characters come to learn about and the civilizations that they once had. The author leaves some of these questions open and I hope that she would write more about this world and the different specific moments in time that we only were told about, such as how humanity evolved over time.
Noumenon Infinity is much more than space, aliens, and strange objects next to stars that have been for thousands of years, it’s a complex web of characters that are trying to live their lives as best as they can aboard the only world that they have ever known and complete the mission they were born for. The story touches other relevant topics that make the story more colorful and humanness letting the reader be able to experience today’s real-world topics in this fascinating story.
“No, he was some caricature of Narcissus, who’d been so enamored with his own glory that he let truths float down the river of time and over the falls of inevitability. He was Icarus, flying too close—perhaps literally—to a sun. The obviousness of the Web’s malign existence glared at him from the bottom of those falls, swallowing the hopes and dreams of his life.”
If you are a fan of the science fiction genre, of the eternal questions of “is there life in space?” and “what our purpose in life is?”, or simply a fan of Marina J. Lostetter, then I recommend you, Noumenon Infinity. Here we follow the crew of Noumenon Infinity, the second relaunch of the Noumenon mission, as they travel to collect the power of a strange alien object light years away, and the story of the Twelve Convey that launched at the same time as the Noumenon mission but disappeared during their testing mission. The crew members of both Convoys will do their best to survive in outer space while trying to solve the mystery of the strange objects near them.
*OBS would like to thank the publisher for supplying a free copy of this title in exchange for an honest review*
