Paul Melko, Singularity's Ring [Library of Babel]

I tried to get a copy of this at Boskone, but Larry Smith's whole stock sold out on Friday, before I hit the dealer's room at all. I'm not sure how many copies there were originally, but Melko was doing the Happy Dance at the Tor party, and deservedly so. I had to wait to get my copy until we got home, and hit a regular bookstore.

Singularity's Ring is the story of Apollo Papdopulos, who is actually a "pod," a group of five genetically engineered humans who bond together (via visual and chemical signals) to form a single individual. Each of the five has been engineered for a specific task: Strom has brute strength, Quant facility with math, Manuel has prehensile feet and exceptional dexterity, Meda is good at talking to people, and Moira serves as the conscience of the group. They're part of a training program aimed at selecting a pod to captain a starship and find out what happened to the rest of humanity.

The book is set in the aftermath of a Singularity type event. Earth is circled by a giant orbiting ring, and dotted with remnants of exceptional high technology, but the billions of humans who built this stuff, and linked with computers to form an entity called the Community, are gone. It's not really clear what happened to them, but the pods who control the remnants of Earth's population aim to find out by sending a spaceship through the Rift that the Community opened just beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Apollo is in training, hoping to become the captain of that ship, but a series of sinister accidents put them on the track of some dark secrets and conspiracies.

This is the sort of book that has the potential to be really annoying-- a Singularity novel with a viewpoint character who's actually five individuals merged into a group mind. This easily could've degenerated into trendy technobabble and overly-clever experimental writing.

I'm happy to report, though, that Melko deftly avoids all the obvious traps of the scenario. The different components of Apollo Padadopulos have distinct voices, and the group-mind stuff is kept to a minimum and handled very smoothly. And while there is some gosh-wow technology associated with the Community, he avoids going overboard with "Rapture for Nerds" stuff.

The course of the plot takes a little while to really resolve-- some bits toward the beginning seem at first like pointless digressions thrown in to allow a little travelogue-as-exposition. It all does come together by the end, though, and the final resolution of the plot is very satisying. The secrets and conspiracies are unfolded slowly, but the book is never dull, and the action scenes are very well done.

This is Melko's first novel-- he's written a bunch of short fiction, including the Hugo-nominated novella "The Walls of the Universe", which was one of the best stories on last year's ballot. It's an excellent debut, and I look forward to reading what he does next.