McAuley’s eccentric retread of late 19th-century science (Saltmire’s kind are just wrapping their furry heads around the concept of adaptation through natural selection) provides the intellectual framework for a spirited tale of travel, manners and professorial skulduggery ... McAuley is not a showy writer, but his fiendishness gets under your skin.' Clearly, our species has paid the ultimate price for our hubris. The scars of our existence can still be found in places like Ogre’s Grave, but nature recovers—eventually. 200,000 years after our catastrophes, this planet seems to be a fine place. The travels of the main characters provide the opportunity for McAuley to describe a full and vivid natural world, much like our own. Indeed, the extent to which the plot is entwined with a form of travel writing is reminiscent of planetary romance. McAuley’s work more generally often provides a clear sense of place through his description of setting, whether alien worlds, artificial environments or, as here , something very much like our own landscapes. It is the slower pace of travel in this novel, as in 2020’s War of the Maps , that provides a strong sense of the novel being a planetary adventure. I will not tell more of the plot, as finding out about each new revelation is part of the fun. Of course there are new layers to peel off about this future world and how it came to be and I thought it was all well thought out. The first half of the book was a bit hard to go through. It reads like a nineteenth century novel about a young scientist following a lead and is a bit meandering. But in the second half another perspective is introduced and the pace ramps up. At that point I was thoroughly hooked. Sadly though even if the main questions were answered, the author chose to end on a bit of cliffhanger. But that's not a large issue.

Risking his reputation and his life, Pilgrim’s search for the truth takes him from his comfortable home in the shadow of a great library to his tribe’s former home on the chilly coast of the far south, and the gathering of a dangerous cult in the high desert. Whether or not the visitors are real, one thing is certain. Pilgrim’s world and everything he thought he knew about his people’s history will be utterly changed.

Paul manages to do that clever thing of telling stories from non-human perspectives and yet still embody human characteristics – a thirst for knowledge and understanding, love, friendship, envy, and even bureaucracy! – all of which make the characters quite endearing. At times the lifestyle of these creatures is more enviable than that of the humans, managing a lifestyle on the whole mainly without violence and in keeping with the nature of their planet. It is also interesting how much the species imitate human nature – there’s a wry look at cult religion and paranoid conspiracy theories that also feels strangely appropriate to us humans, as too the revelation of an Invisible College, run by females who wish to enable the emancipation of women. Injustice exists in different yet recognisable ways here too. I don't remember much about those UFO books now. Apart from a few which attempted to give impartial overviews of the phenomenon, most were, like Adamski's book, eccentric personal revelations of The moral of the tale is that nothing is ever quite what it seems, or even that which we may wish it to be. McAuley navigates this terrain with his signature elegaic style - slightly distant, but not far enough removed for the reader not to connect with the characters and invest in their fate. It is notable too for the elaborate worldbuilding creating and describing the culture of Pilgrim and his compatriots. And also for an insight into the wish to do good, and the often unintended consequences of those altruistic intentions. This work by http://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. even tinier traces of beryllium. Everything heavier than hydrogen and helium (called metals by astronomers, so both oxygen and carbon, for instance, are metals) had to be forged by fusion in stars, so the very

The scale of a planet becomes all the more apparent when Pilgrim is exiled to the far south, a place of snowy winters. He is tasked with cataloguing a library abandoned by his tribe some decades before and, through the cold dark winter this task provides intellectual satisfaction amidst physical and social deprivation. In the process he discovers a map which may provide more insight into the visitors, and to a possible connection with the madness of the Bears. However, Pilgrim loses this along with the rest of his research, as events once again over take him. Paul McAuley dives into the deep future in his latest novel. Humanity is gone, mysterious Ogres fallen victim to climate change and their own hubris. Uplifted bears have risen and fallen once more. Their fall to barbarism has freed their slaves, racoons also modified by the whims of lost humanity.The first novel by poet J.O. Morgan, Pupa is set in an alternate world predicated on a single what if? -- what if human reproduction resembled that of insects, with larval forms hatching from eggs, and changing, via pupae, into the adult form? Sal is a larval who tells himself he is content with his lot. He's an unambitious office drone with a necessarily unrequited friendship with another larval, Megan, and has no intention of willing the potentially fatal transformation to adulthood. As he tells Megan, 'You can't know if you'll like how you'll turn out.' But by a single uncharacteristic act, he precipates Megan's decision to change, and puts his own assumptions to the test. John Barrow for the SF magazine Interzone (several of his books, notably his collaboration with Frank Tippler, the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, What was it like, then? The universe was still somewhat hotter and denser than it is now, and star formation was more intense, but there were stars and recognisable galaxies, even if they were small and irregular or simple spirals rather than elliptical giants like the Milky Way. Given what we know now about the abundance of exoplanets, some of those stars may have culture of science through the career of its central character, Mariella Anders. It's also a science thriller turning on the speculation,

A biologist by training, UK science fiction author McAuley writes mostly hard science fiction, dealing with themes such as biotechnology, alternate history/alternate reality, and space travel. By then, the universe had begun to be enriched by metals, too, including the stuff of life. But the composition of surviving members of the subsequent Population II generation of stars suggests that around a billion years after the Big Bang the universe was still extremely metal-poor; even the oldest Population I stars, formed 2 - 3 billion years later, contain only a tenth of the metal content of youngers stars like our sun. The first reissue is an ebook edition of my second novel, Secret Harmonies, first published in the US, in 1989, as Of the Fall. A title whose slight pun wouldn't, my then-editor Malcolm Edwards said, be appreciated by British readers; and thus the title change.Later the story moves along some decades in the future and switches again in perspective, though Pilgrim's discoveries are still its main focus. The second part is by its nature much faster-paced than the first and at times this makes it seems a bit rushed especially towards the ending which solves the main mysteries at least to a large extent, though as in any good story, leaves enough hooks for a possible sequel. There are detailed, immersive passages describing reef biology, geology and history, and measuring the destruction and loss in the present and the consequences for the future against the unspoiled Risking his reputation and his life, Pilgrim's search for the truth takes him from his comfortable home in the shadow of a great library to his tribe's former home on the chilly coast of the far south, and the gathering of a dangerous cult in the high desert. Whether or not the visitors are real, one thing is certain. Pilgrim's world and everything he thought he knew about his people's history will be utterly changed.

They call themselves people, and certainly deserve the name. They are, with some significant exceptions, curious, peaceable, likeable and inventive. But they are not human. Pilgrim Saltmire is one of these (a mole, or badger, or what-you-will), a young academic determined to finish the monograph of his dear departed master, Able. I think the thing that gets me is that it seemed to be very intentional and I just don't understand what purpose it served.In summary then, as with the best of Paul’s work, Beyond the Burn Line is inventive and smart, engaging and logical. As a reader I found myself caring a great deal about what happens to Pilgrim, his descendants, and their world, until by the end when the story was done, I was sad to find it finished.