Eclipse Penumbra

'''Shirley, John. Eclipse Penumbra.''' Book Two of The Eclipse Trilogy, vt A SONG CALLED YOUTH trilogy. 1985; New York: Popular Library/Questar, 1988. Revised and updated edition, Northridge, CA: Babbage Press, 2000. Erlich listened to the 2014 unabridged audiobook from Audible.

See for FirStep, a space colony in L-5 orbit; high-tech surveillance and inducements to violence; "the Grid"—the communications net that people must learn to use or be used by (84-86, 287-89, 307); "cerebrointerfacing" and a kind of "ghost in the machine" in the FirStep Life Support Systems Computer (246; 271-78, 294-95); "the extractor," a kind of mind-reading and/or mind-altering device, and other technological messing with minds (49, 309-10)—and for the political possibilities of computer animation. (Staff, Initial postings)

Early in the novel (ch. 5 in audiobook), we learn that on the orbiting space colony FirStep, a cult is developing around what is seen as the "spirit" of Professor Rimpler, founder of the colony, who had been killed aiding an uprising of the Technicki underclass and has had portions of his brain — erased of memories and personality by "Extraction" — put into "cerebral-cybernetic interface" to augment the colony's failing life-support computer system. At novel's end, the cult idea is not developed, and (spoiler here), Rimpler's brain parts are eventually disconnected — raising questions of whether or not that act is a kind of homicide — and replaced with more conventional computer parts.

A motif that will be developed in the final book is the Grid that includes Earth and the space colony: an augmented world-wide web that can be used for propaganda, and indications of high-tech devices plus programming that spot, analyzes, and reports such propaganda. Also a continuing motif: extraction as a way not only to get information but for mind-control far more direct and complete than propaganda. (RDE 18-24Feb17)