In this futuristic setting the vampires have been revived by scientists after they had become extinct in, roughly, Pleistocene. I have rarely read about a more intriguing fantastic beast. Or rather one vampire present in the novel, Jukka Sarasti – hovering in the background but having, so to speak, an enormous gravitational pull.
Instead let me be completely shallow and focus on…vampires. I could wax eloquent over the set of original secondary characters, easy to like and interesting to follow around, or the world building, a bit nightmarish but still incredibly engaging. I could praise the action scenes and the fact that there were no infodumps in the narration even if the main lead, Siri Keeton, the Synthesist, time and again was reminiscing about his childhood, love affair and many things in-between.
I could wax lyrical about the erudition the author displays and I mean science and psychology on a very high level – really, truly impressive stuff. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find – but you’d give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send a pacifist warrior, and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Who to send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn’t want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder, and a biologist so spliced to machinery he can’t feel his own flesh. Something talks out there: but not to us. The heavens have been silent since – until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. It’s been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. Lovely Melfka featured this one on her blog – thank you, I owe you a lot!
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