Lostetter, Marina J
Entry updated 6 March 2023. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Rats Will Run" in Mirror Shards: Volume Two (anth 2012) edited by Thomas K Carpenter; the tale is included in Lifeboats: Three Short Stories of Space Travel and Epic Discovery (coll 2017 ebook). She came to wide attention with the Noumenon sequence beginning with Noumenon (2017), which begins on Earth in the moderately distant-Near-Future Earth of 2088, a time when it has at last become possible for giant corporations to contemplate the exploration of the galaxy, in this case to create a nest of Faster Than Light Generation Starships under AI control and inhabited by breeding Clones whose destination is an enigmatic star system known as LQ Pyx which may be a Dyson Sphere or some other Macrostructure. The series itself, broken mosaically into an accumulation of mini-narratives, conveys a sense of genuine and evolving complexity without the melodramatic Conceptual Breakthrough structure typical of many earlier Generation Starship novels, though contact with mother Earth is distorted by time dilation (see Relativity) and – as usual – is soon lost. As the planet is reached by the convoy featured in the first volume, other parallel voyages are engaged upon over an extended time period; transcendentalizing Space Opera topoi emerge, with signs that within the Time Abyss inner machinery of the manufactured planet may repose – or lurk – secrets of the universe. [JC]
Marina J Lostetter
born Oregon
works
series
Noumenon
- Noumenon (New York: Harper Voyager, 2017) [Noumenon: pb/Steven Messing]
- Noumenon Infinity (New York: Harper Voyager, 2018) [Noumenon: pb/Steven Messing]
- Noumenon Ultra (New York: Harper Voyager, 2020) [Noumenon: pb/Steven Messing]
The Five Penalties
- The Helm of Midnight (New York: Tor, 2021) [The Five Penalties: hb/Sam Weber]
- The Cage of Dark Hours (New York: Tor, 2023) [The Five Penalties: hb/]
individual titles
- Activation Degradation (New York: Harper Voyager, 2021) [pb/]
collections and stories
- Lifeboats: Three Short Stories of Space Travel and Epic Discovery (Little Lost Stories, 2017) [coll: ebook: na/]
links
previous versions of this entry