Earth, 2088: Humankind, finally at peace under the Planet United Consortium, develops the faster-than-light means to travel beyond the solar system. Twelve exploratory missions are planned, though their destinations have yet to be decided. Astrophysicist Reggie Straifer proposes a trip to LQ Pyxidis, a strange star whose variable brightness makes it a scientific mystery. Either some previously unknown natural phenomenon is shrouding the star, or it is blocked by a Dyson sphere--an artificial power plant and possible proof of alien life.
Reggie's proposal is accepted. Convoy Seven, nine ships equipped with subdimensional drives, will spend centuries traveling to LQ Pyxidis while millennia pass on Earth. Generations must live and die during the mission, and the only way to preserve the crew's initial scientific and engineering talent is to use clones. A society unlike any other in human history is founded, planned to the finest detail, with every biological and mechanical variable accounted for. But as the decades, then centuries roll on, imperfections in the convoy's creation--including the unpredictable personalities emerging in each new clone--threaten to derail mankind's most ambitious undertaking.
Noumenon is told in vignettes spaced throughout Convoy Seven's mission. Each chapter follows a clone, or the ship's artificial intelligence, in snapshots of starry sci-fi splendor and down-to-earth human drama. Nature versus nurture, the rights of the individual versus the collective, power politics and what it means to be sentient clash as the centuries pass. Noumenon is a grand achievement of speculative fiction. --Tobias Mutter