Synopsis:
HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO TO BE FREE?
Inside the paradise of a Dyson Sphere, artificial intelligence has been outlawed and hunted. When a robot is dug up at the equator, it will have to flee if it wants to survive.
Told from the different perspectives of the humans and creatures who encounter the machine as it crosses the Sphere to seek refuge at the pole, can one robot’s struggle for freedom change the world?
Review:
Okay…let me be clear: Cage of Stars by Frasier Armitage is a book that I’m jealous of. I wish I’d written it and I will be adding it to a list of books I will re-read at some point. It was a whirlwind of a journey that took me across space and genres and I loved every minute of it.
I honestly didn’t know what I was getting into when I picked up Armitage’s latest work, but I’m infatuated by Dyson Spheres. I’m sure I, like many people, had never heard of Dyson Spheres until Geordi LaForge met his engineering icon Scotty Montgomery when the original Trek character embedded himself in a transporter buffer for decades until the Enterprise-D came along in Season 6 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The concept of building a shell in a livable radius around a star was new and revelatory to adolescent me and still continues to intrigue me to this day.
Armitage takes the concept and uses it, but doesn’t focus on it. It’s there and the quirks of the Sphere play heavily into certain parts of Cage of Stars but he wisely makes his characters the main attraction and it pays off big time.
Our protagonist is Mac, a robot who was one of the builders of the Dyson Sphere, but then was buried under the dirt of this new world until he slowly worked his way to the surface, being reborn into a world he knew nothing about. Mac is so different from almost every character he meets in the book, but Armitage makes him the audience fill-in with an interesting trick — he never lets Mac have his own POV. Every interaction with him is from the other characters’ point-of-view, so we never truly get his internal dialogue, but Mac is an open book, sharing his thoughts freely so instead we see everyone else’s reactions to him and…it works.
There was a familiarity to Cage of Stars that I couldn’t shake, but it wasn’t a perfect comparison to any one story. There is a bit of Odysseus vibe to Mac as he journeys from the earth and nature of the Sphere to Freedom, and the cast of characters lent itself to Huckleberry Finn and all the mad cap adventures he and Jim find themselves in. Ultimately, since Mac is almost like a newborn in a world that has adapted and evolved in the many years since he built it, a great comparison for was actually Are You My Mother?, the classic children’s book by P.D. Eastman.
There is an innocence to Mac’s character and some of the writing is beautiful as he embarks upon his journey that literally takes him from the earth to the sky. I found myself racing to finish once I got about two-thirds of the way through and had a wonderful time reading Cage of Stars. In the end, I was thrilled to read Frasier Armitage’s Cage of Stars and will gladly recommend it to anyone who asks.
Leave a Reply