A decent bit of sci-fi, a mixture of hard (inspiration and ideas) and soft (themes and time). Quite fun, with a very 80s feel ( )

Imagine, if you will, the endless cycles of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. Assume for a moment that this 60 million year oscillation was the heartbeat of the universe - the universe called Cor. During one of these heartbeats (or, perhaps all of them), a supreme intelligence emerges - an intelligence that wants to live. The cost of this eternal life is the cessation of the heartbeats of Cor. How hard would the universe fight for its own survival? What price would Cor pay for its continuation?

Demarq and Gerian, thrown together by accident and by design, play their roles in the endless tragedy for 450 billion years. Fleeing at close the speed of light until the end of the universe. Demarq, a courier, called up on to deliver the unwilling Gerian into a forced marriage on his own wedding night - a delivery that appeared as a single day to him, but a lifetime to his new bride - arrives back home just in time for his wife's funeral. Into this combination of rage and frustration, we get a bottle of poison designed to deliver the girl from her fate, instead becomes a love potion. And so their eternal flight begins. And it ends exactly where and when it began and it ends with end of the universe.

I have to admit, the alien vocabulary got to be a bit annoying after awhile - all the measurements (time, distance, volume) are given in a made up language. Other annoyances are the passivity that Gerian displays most of the time and the silliness of the desirability of fur covered breasts. And, of course, we have a whole series of cliches: past self killing future self, magic rings, love potions, cyclical nature of time, machines acquiring a desire to live, sentient computers and machines, ouigi boards, time travel through black holes, love saving the universe, etc. For me, the other big annoyance was the inability of Demarq and Gerian to figure out how their history will unfold. We certainly did have the advantage of being told what was going on, but their cluelessness was frustrating. ( )

I have a giant, ultra-soft spot for this book. It's cheesy as hell, it's clichéd to no end, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it's also an utter delight to read, precisely because of its cheerful disregard for sense-making. 3D Characters, you say? Psh! Who needs those when we have extravagance?

The assumption in the background is that our current universe is the latest in a series of cycles of big bangs followed by big crunches. This story deals with the previous iteration, in which a race of spacefaring cat people have been made subservient to the rule of two planet-sized supercomputers (that crazy idea in itself should make you want to read the book). Foreseeing their coming demise in a matter of 13 billion years, these computers attempt to disrupt the cycle of the universe by blowing up an entire galaxy. The idea is that when the universe reaches its tipping point between expanding and contracting, the lack of a galaxy's worth of matter is enough to keep the universe at that tipping point indefinitely, leaving the computers free to think their cold thoughts for all eternity. (In this fictional universe there's a brief time gap between matter disintegrating and reappearing as light/heat/other energy that makes this plan possible. The flaw has been fixed in our current iteration.) An inherent part of the computers' scheme involves the extinction of all life forms, ever, since keeping the universe in this stable condition means that all energy (light, temperature, motion, matter, ...) will gradually be used up and everything will freeze eternally at absolute zero, dooming all future lifeforms in all future universes in the process.

But there are some who resist! A ragtag band of plucky resistance fighters send off two star-crossed lovers on board of one spaceship to remedy the situation. Their plan is to have the ship go on an uninterrupted voyage for billions of years at near-lightspeed, during which it will accumulate enough theoretical mass to make up for the loss of an entire galaxy. This will enable the universe to start contracting again and to continue its eternal cycle. Oh, and the universe turns out to be a sentient entity.

If this seems like a giant fuck you to physics, well that's because there's luurrve involved, dammit! With love potions and ray guns! And cat-people-chess! And time travel! And near-lightspeed spaceship chases! And it's a cat-people version of Tristan and Isolde, too. In space!

It's rolicking good fun. Ignore reality and enjoy the ride. ( )

It does feature a sentient cat people, and something like that usually sets off my alarm bell, but this is a Space Opera with an emphasis on Opera. It's about love -Tristan and Isolde type love. It's amazing how staggeringly romantic Harness is and gets away with it. A universe controlling pair of artificial intelligences built around male and female cortical tissue respectively, are planning to disrupt the cyclical death and rebirth of the universe so that they can function at absolute zero in a dead universe forever. Two star crossed lovers and a space ship -the Firebird of the title, are what could ruin their plan. A mindblowingly huge story by a true Vogtmaster. I'll grant the the novel hinges on a fairly predictiable twist to anyone who has read a few thousand of these things -but it doesn't matter. Short, sweet, richly detailed and highly recommended to everyone including fantasy readers. Worth hunting down and reading. It is one of the novels in the NESFA hardbound anthology Rings. ( )