EMPRESS OF FOREVER

Gladstone shifts gears from an almost scientific brand of
fantasy (The Ruin of Angels, 2017, etc.) to fantastical space opera.

Billionaire tech genius Vivian Liao has dangerously annoyed the
political powers that be through her aggressively public liberal activism. So
she breaks into a secure facility with the intention of hacking into the
global computing network, which would allow her to counter her enemies and
would, incidentally, give her world dominion. Not only does Viv manage to trip
an alarm, though, but a glowing green figure brutally transports her several
millennia into the future. That future is controlled by the same green
personage, the Empress, who monitors everything through the Cloud (a far more evolved
version of our own digital atmosphere), looting and then squashing any
civilization reaching a certain level of technological sophistication to
prevent it from attracting the deadly attention of a devouring species called
the Bleed. Thrust immediately into danger, Viv collects a motley group of
companions as she struggles to understand what’s happened to her (readers will
figure out Viv’s link to the Empress before she does), find a way home, and
attempt to break the Empress’ stranglehold on the galaxy. Adventure
breathlessly follows on adventure, crisis on crisis, so quickly one is hard put
to recall each step of the journey; the main purpose is to bond a disparate
team of heroes. The power of love and/or friendship overcoming a single adversary
is of course an overused trope, but Gladstone actually has a valid
reason for using it here: He’s illustrating the danger of allowing one
person to decide that she knows best and simply grab control of everything—even
if that person is stratospherically intelligent and (at least initially) has
good intentions. He also seems to be commenting on the dangers of the current
Silicon Valley cult(ure), in which a company is driven by the quirks of one
brilliant entrepreneur.

An interesting and intellectually fertile enterprise.