Book Review: Star's Reach

This is a wild one, set four hundred years in the future.  The U.S. as we know it is no more but has been supplanted by a rump state "Meriga" and a handful of peripheral nations scattered along the friendly-to-hostile spectrum.  Incompetent government, climate change, and oil depletion have done their worst, and while it never came to all-out nuclear war, things got pretty bad for a while.  But that's all three hundred years in the past and now there's a medieval feeling in the air and things are slowly getting better.  It's recognizably America, but in about the same way that a first century Roman would recognize tenth century France.

So that's the set-up, and like any good Middle Ages based fantasy novel, there has to be a young quasi-knight and his band of slightly disreputable nobles, sprinkled with the odd scholar or two who know about the old ways, a treacherous comrade who secretly wants to seize the old magic for his own ends, a wandering wise man who pops in at key times, ruins to explore, treasures to find... and above all there's The Quest.

Here, The Quest is based on an old legend (aren't they always) from just before things fell apart, about a TWO WAY radio telescope where we'd made preliminary contact with aliens.  A clue as to the telescope's location is found early on, and we're off to the races.  It's a pretty good setup, as these things go.

Based on the above, you probably already have a good idea if you'll like this book or not, so I'll wrap this up with a few notes and move on to the rest of my Saturday.  Personally, it was hard to put down, but I'm glad to have finished and now it's time to jump to some other books.

On to those few notes:
– The book has an unusual structure, jumping forward and back in time.  Major mysteries are answered early in almost a spoiler-ish fashion, but then the story hangs in there to make getting to how events unfold worth reading.  It's a good trick, and the author pulls it off. 
– About a third of the way through the thought came to me "this author has got to be a ham radio operator."  Nothing overt, but little clues like AN/URC-117 GWEN showing up on a key document, a radioman guild, etc.  Looked in a database and yep.  Extra class, too.
– Evidently when first published this book took on a minor following which put together resources like a small wiki, maps of Meriga, those sorts of things.  This even went so far as to spin off a short story collection that's still in print.  The fervor seems to have cooled a little with time, but the web pages are still out there.  It never quite gripped me to that degree, but I was at least intrigued enough to give it a quick web search.

OK that's enough, and more than enough for you to decide whether to read or not.

ps, much later: I forgot to include the author's name in the text, even though it is in the above image: John Michael Greer.  Lacking this, it kind of makes it hard to search.