John C Wright's homeric writing:

Here is an example of the magnificent Homeric style of John C Wright in the third book, The Golden Transcendence. This story is about the only space colony outside Earth's solar system, which falls suddenly and mysteriously silent. Here the emissary from that colony, the Second Silent Oecumene, explains what occured there:

“At her height, the Second Oecumene had several hundred small artificial suns and nucleogenesis stations orbiting very far from the black hole, and tends of thousands of diamond habitats, belt upon concentric belt of asteroid mansions, as if the rings of Saturn, expanded to encompass an area greater than your Solar System, were made of inextinguishable fire and glittering fields of endless living jewellry!”

And the crushing conclusion, several pages later:

“The ultimate results of this you know. The Last Broadcast from our Oecumene showed the catastrophe which ended our tragedy. The nanomachine swarm absorbed all things. For ease of storage, all human minds were reduced to noumenal coded pulses,which in the form of electromagnetic energy, were shot into orbit around the near-event horizon of our dark sun. You know gravity warps space and can bend light? Our dark sun, deep in its gravity well, can bend light so far around the photons will orbit the singularity core in a stable circle, balanced precisely at the edge of the event horizon. Their time is slowed almost to nothing there. They are beyond all natural harm. For them, not even one second has passed.

“No one objected to this process. Our law had made them content.

“The Nothing Mentality had achieved its programmed goals. The human of the Second Oecumene were entirely safe. With no further purpose to its existence, and with no innate desire to live, the great machine extinguished itself.

“And the Silent Oecumene never made noise or music again.”