Damn, that's a lot of information in the back cover blurb! There's a lot in the opening chapter too, but it's really telling us that everything's already happened and Jove and Elmyrah are doing fine in 2470 CE. Then we can skip back to 812 CE for some setup, before leaping back forward for the bulk of the story, which starts in 2024 CE. Why everything's ruthlessly Earth-dated, I have no idea, as it's fundamentally about aliens, one of whom eventually even frames himself as a new messiah. It's all a lot to take in at once, but it's also surprisingly accessible and engaging, somewhere between the Hugo winning authors David Brin and C. J. Cherryh.

I'll take a deep breath and try to set you up appropriately. Out there in deep space are a bunch of good guys called the Legion of Worlds and some bad guys called the Prawl-Tang. It's not remotely that simple, as we'll eventually learn, but it's a good starting point. The Prawl-Tang are symbiotic starfish who fly around stealing everyone else's hydrogen. The Legion are myriad in form and any other category you care to employ. Patrick Tylee imagines deeply here, giving us aliens who really feel alien, in culture, structure and tradition, on top of physical appearance and, inevitably, tech.

The introductory chapter set in 812 CE features a multi-species Legion of Worlds Intelligence Corps crew on a recon flight into Prawl-Tang space, where they find a bevy of super scoops on their way to the Flame Nebula. One clearly isn't going to make it and, when we jump to 2024 CE, we realise why. It's got lost and ended up in our solar system, where Jupiter suddenly looks rather attractive. The catch is that Jupiter is the home to a few other alien species, most notably the Knowers, who are a race of enormous squid swimming in its gas clouds. The Prawl-Tang will happily wipe them all out to get their hydrogen, and the Manufactured Flesh and SynThinker Union don't want that to happen.

So to the character who matters; the Union is one of the species within the Legion of Worlds, one comprised entirely of pacifist clones. What they do to save the Knowers is to create a new class of clone, genetically designed to serve as mediators and diplomats, and send them in to achieve the goals they can't themselves. Now, I say them, but because we're dealing with clones them really translates to just Jove. Sure, there are 28 of him but only one is active at a time. He'll do whatever he can and the moment he dies, for whatever reason, the next one will kick in and continue with a full knowledge of everything up to that point, almost like respawning a character at the last save-point in a videogame.

Jove's job is to save the Knowers from the Prawl-Tang, but he achieves that by effectively trading one planet for another. Leave Jupiter alone. Take Earth instead, or LittleNoisyBluePearl, as those enormous squid call us. The catch to that is obvious from our perspective, but initially it's a highly different one, namely that we have a lot of nuclear weapons that we could hurl at the Prawl-Tang, being primitive but dangerous, so Jove has to convince us to give them up. And, the more time he spends with us, the more his goals change.

I haven't even mentioned Elmyrah yet, the other character who survives through to the prologue in 2470 CE. She's a little girl living on the streets of Al-Zulfi, Saudi Arabia, who happens to discover that Prawl-Tang superscoop orbiting Io, so becomes far more prominent. Eventually, through wild accident, she becomes a hybrid of human, Union clone and Prawl-Tang, Jove's constant companion. Oh, and then there's Knowledgebase and Wisdom, the "para-sentient virtual entities" that assist Jove on his mission. They have to be important, right? After all, the book is called 'Wisdom' rather than 'Jove' or 'Elmyrah'.

As you might imagine, there's a heck of a lot here and the biggest success that Tylee finds has to be how he throws so much at us yet somehow manages to make it all feel accessible. I'm sure that some readers won't get past the first few chapters, leaving in a cloud of confusion, but focusing on the sweep and ignoring the detail works wonders - for a while. Once that far, suddenly the details all make sense and we find ourselves utterly on board with half a dozen primary characters being of different species: human, Prawl-Tang, Knower, artificial intelligence and Manufactured Flesh and SynThinker Union, along with an innovative hybrid of three of the above.

Much of the accessible side reminded me of David Brin, who achieved much the same thing in his 'Uplift' series, throwing many truly alien species together but making it seem completely normal. The more technical side reminded me of C. J. Cherryh, whose 'Alliance Union' novels dive deep into technical detail. 'Cyteen' in particular featured an entire species of clones imagined richly enough to often feel like a textbook. There's a lot of both here, but Jove shifts away from them, reminding of a swathe of characters, not least Valentine Michael Smith in Robert A. Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land', Thomas Jerome Newton in Walter Tevis's 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' and Klaatu in 'The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Jove grows substantially as a character, as do Wisdom and Elmyrah. Most of the other humans are effectively props, as admirably diverse as they are. This is fundamentally a story about aliens that merely happens to largely take place on and around our planet. It's never really about us, at least not directly. Our nuclear weapons may serve as a fair MacGuffin, and Tylee dips into a near future prediction or three, but we only truly matter as a species rather than individuals. That's going to be another reason some readers might drift away, if they can't find a way to connect to the aliens at the heart of the story. Maybe Elmyrah will keep some of them. Maybe not.

I think this will play best to fans of hard science fiction who are also willing to dabble in softer sci-fi. It feels like the background layer is all hard science fiction, richly built, but the foreground is about the human condition, ironically given that it's applied to aliens. It's about Jove learning who he is, what life means to him and others and how to make the huge decisions that his creators couldn't. Of course, it's fundamentally a first-contact story, even if it's far more about Jove making contact with the Knowers and then we humans, than it is about us making contact with him.

It's generally well-presented, with only a few odd spelling errors of the sort that aren't caught by spellcheckers, like "puss" for "pus", "teaming" for "teeming” and "decent" for "descent". The real problems I had came late, because the last few chapters played oddly to me. One doesn't seem to need to be there at all and I'm not convinced at all about the "happy ending". I won't talk about it here because that would be spoiler material, but there's an obvious comparison to make and that became a long running series in which the happy ending quickly ceased to be quite so happy. I have to wonder, given that there is a sequel to 'Wisdom', if 'Rebellion' will take a similar approach. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Patrick Tylee click here