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Resolution the conclusion to John Meaney's epic Nulapeiron Space Opera trilogy, pitting Tom Corcoran against the Blight an even bigger and nastier version of the Anomaly.
Resolution is the conclusion to John Meaney’s epic Nulapeiron Space Opera trilogy Much of the last decade has been spent on one enormous trilogy. This year he finally finished off – after six years and fifteen hundred pages – his colossal Nulapeiron Sequence comprising Paradox, Context and Resolution. With two distinct story-lines running in tandem for almost the entire trilogy, the books are both prequels and sequels to Meaney’s first novel, To Hold Infinity, and include a 1994 short story, ‘Parallax Transform’, as well as sharing a fictional universe with a novella, ‘The Whisper of Disks.’ All three books are set on the subterranean caverns and tunnels of Nulapeiron, at the beginning of the 35th century. The first two are reviewed on this link and here respectively. Resolution is the conclusion to the sequence, and is the best book of the trilogy, partly because it is shorter and has fewer plot threads than the others. Meaney at long last seems to hit his stride with a conclusion in sight, and does not seem to be so preoccupied with jump-cuts. The Anomaly, a bigger and nastier version of The Blight, has become aware of Nulapeiron’s existence. The Anomaly takes over people’s minds to the extent that they do not even know that they’ve been taken over. Meaney flirts with the idea that maybe Corcoran and his resistance have the wrong perspective, and has Corcoran entertaining similar doubts. But then he nails such dithering toward the end in a scene of Ethnic Cleansing ad Absurdiam. Just to show how nasty it is Meaney has previously loving couple suddenly becoming ruthlessly efficient, and tossing their disabled son into a vat of gunk because he is not perfect, and therefore easier to replace. Dramatic it is, effective it may be; subtle it isn’t. One of the difficulties Nulapeiron shares with Lord of the Rings, A Fire Upon the Deep and other big-sellers where a plucky David is faced with an all-consuming Goliath is how to characterize rampant evil. To be honest, Meaney doesn’t even try. The Anomaly is big, its nasty, and its going to eat them all. That’s all the characterization the reader needs. To be fair, Meaney does many things well. Corcoran is an effective lead in the Paul Atreides (from Dune) role, and there’s a huge amount of ‘tech’ on offer, such as arachnobugs, genetically engineered lorry-sized critters that scuttle through the endless caverns at near-supersonic speed. And with the amount of space to write in, Nulapeiron does at the end stand as a real world, with a genuine history. And the Pilot sequence, at first an irritating distraction, then a seemingly endless second thread, does at last become a coherent plot thread that resolves quite nicely. There’s pretty much enough material for a short novel in the Pilot thread itself, and that the whole Nulapeiron sequence has the whiff of a trilogy more to with commerce than art. And the climax of Resolution reads very much like a recycled version of To Hold Infinity. But if the reader likes their space opera big and fast and laced with a genuine whiff of the future, then they could do worse than give The Nulapeiron Sequence a try.
The copyright of the article Resolution by John Meaney in Space Opera is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Resolution by John Meaney in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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