Transcendence

Charles Sheffield, who was himself a scientist, wrote smart, hard science fiction adventure stories. TRANSCENDENCE is exactly that--smart, hard science fiction adventure. This is a story that both awes and excites as a group of beings (human and alien) travels in search of a hostile race called the Zardalu. The characters in the book encountered these aliens earlier in this series, titled The Heritage Universe. (This book is Volume 3.) Geoffrey Howard's English accent is a nice match for the material. He does his best work when he's performing comic relief through one of the novel's characters. S.D. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

March 30, 1992
Sheffield's ``The Heritage Universe,'' which also includes Summertide and Divergence , reads as one continuous narrative, with each book ending at a good place to take a pause in the overall story. By this third volume, the group of humans and aliens we have followed throughout are now tracking the Zardalu. Thought extinct for thousands of years, a small number of these creatures--who are so deadly that they have become bogeymen in this future history--were preserved by the mysterious Builders, whom our heroes have been trying to learn more about from the beginning of their adventures, to little avail. One of the most interesting aspects of this series is the evolution of professor Darya Lang from the nervous academic on her first trip off her home planet in Summertide to a woman as or more capable of handling herself in a stressful situation as any of her companions in Transcendence . But, except for Lang and the android E.C. Tally, the characters are one-dimensional. Still, Sheffield's narrative is smooth, and the joys, pitfalls and dangers of exploration are conveyed well.