Hey, space opera sf fans feeling the drought of such books - read these!

Just when I started losing faith in the existence of good science fiction books of a space opera type, that are not a part of some painfully prolonged cycle or have about as much science in them as a cookbook or are written in a teeth pain inducing I-explain-the-setting-in-the-first-chapter style - I have found two real gems, one by a new unknown author and one by an old bearded bear with 44 novels under his belt.

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett - I picked it off the shelf because of a creepy cover and it proved to be a fascinating read. A bit of a rough ending but big kudos for throwing the reader in a middle of an unknown ecosystem of a far away planet without a sun, where the inbred descendants of two Earthlings live in near darkness, awaiting a mythical rescue party from an even more mythical world where the light comes from the sun and not from the fluorescent plants and animals. Chaos awaits the human settlement when a young guy challenges old rituals and gathers a party of youngsters to cross the frozen darkness (not a darkness like we know it, imagine pure darkness with no moon and no nearby stars...) of a mountain range to prove that there is more to this world than one valley in a forest. More kudos for the most imaginative alien ecosystem I have encountered in a good long while. A word of warning, don't read Dark Eden if you are in a depressive mood, it's a rather heavy book that proves that humans are always same in the end, doesn't matter on which world we end up living.

City at the End of Time by Greg Bear - I'm still reading it but I'm so awe struck by the intricate structure and multitude of characters and the in your face chaos theory science bits that I recommend it just now to any sf fan craving what I just mentioned. The story takes place in the future so distant the universe is dying and in the future not so distant where the time is dying, characters are linked between these two story strands by dreams and 'straying' into each others heads. Multiverse, beings that shed matter as inconvenient, future changing the past, muses sorting out lose ends of history, shreds of Earth's dirt as something of most value, books that change what's written inside them and cats that know but are not sharing - I'm going back to reading, excuse me...