Alastair Reynolds
Fantastic. Science fiction should push the boundaries of science and use the resulting world to make you think about strange connections or possibilities in our current non-fiction world. Reynolds does that. Our protagonist, Chiku Yellow, lives on earth in "the surveilled world". The Mechanism is an AI (or machine-substrate consciousness as it prefers to be called) that manages everything from giant construction/recycle machines called Providers to the aug, which is implanted in every living thing and assists with translation, health, etc. Truly the surveilled world. This civilization has sent out colonizers to a planet 28 light years away on holoships (effectively giant, hollowed out, asteroids) and we also find Chiku Green as a leader on one of these ships. One of the core tensions throughout this plot is that the people on the holoships are counting on the development of an engine that depends on physics not yet discovered in order to be able to slow down an actually stop at their new planet.
What I particularly like about this book is how it doesn't just wave over the years worth of communication lag between the holoships and earth. We don't have a magical faster than light communication scheme, but we do have connected stories going on in two vastly separated parts of the galaxy. This is creative storytelling at its best. I also like how we are asked to think about AI, how it might evolve, the pros and cons of "the surveilled world" and even about human identity and our place in nature.
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