Beyond the Burn Line

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I was also, in the later stages of my science career, a published science fiction author. The Secret of Life, published a few years after I became a full-time writer, and just now republished as a Gollanz Masterwork, is my attempt to write a novel that tapped into my life in the labs, foregrounding the practice and

It took me a while to finish, as the first section of the book was a slow go; the story of the natives, their culture and their transition from a pastoral to a near-modern life was curious but unexciting. The transition (and time jump) to it's next section was slightly confusing, and again, sluggish; but the unfolding mystery grabbed more of my attention. The third and final section sped up a bit, but never really achieved that sense of momentum that made me finish it in one night. 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. 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. The first half feels like a rather meandering prelude that can probably be summed up in one sentence. Things really get cooking in the second, so my advice is to persevere.advanced by Peter Davies and others, that all of life on Earth may be decended from microbial life that first evolved on Mars, and the rivalries, politics and commercial chicanery Mariella must navigate to arrive at the truth. That is, squishy carbon-based life-as-we-know-it, not life based on (say) space-time defects or dark matter, like the Xeelee and the Photino Birds in Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence. We were poor, but an aunt owned a boarding house in the south-coast town of Bognor Regis, where my mother's family came from, and that's where we went on holiday for a fortnight every other year. It was, and still is, a somewhat low-rent resort, but there was a park with a boating lake, a miniature railway and a small zoo, and a long promenade with a theatre, a pier and miles of sandy beaches from which, on clear days, the misty coast of France could be glimpsed at the horizon. As far as we were concerned, not knowing any better, it was a kind of paradise. McAuley's fabulous far future, impacted by the consequences of global warming, colonisation and historical injustices, explores and reflects our own challenges while telling a fast paced story of discovery and adventure.

Since 2001, he has produced several SF-based techno-thrillers such as The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, and White Devils.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.'

I stumbled across this book via James Davis Nicoll's posts on Tor.com. It was one of the "Five SF Works About Ruined Civilizations." I bought it and found it very engrossing. Paul McAuley seems to specialise in these conceptual novels. This is no exception. It takes place 200.000 year after the exctinction of humanity. A race of intelligent raccoons has arisen. One of them, Pilgrim Saltmire, tries to complete the research of his mentor, who has passed away. It concerns the observations of mysterious 'visitors' and the question if these are a real phenomenon or pure imagination. Pilgrims journey takes him to the south of his continent, where he finds a map from an earlier civilisation ... The map contains clues to something bigger going on ...Peaceful and emphasising harmony with nature and cooperation between its tribes, but with strict divisions between the roles of men and women, it spans the American continent and is beginning to explore the rest of the world. But now, sightings of mysterious visitors are being reported. Are they bears which escaped the plague, a remnant population of human beings, or an unknown intelligent species? Where are they from, and what do they want?

I was not completely satisfied. I had hoped for much deeper time, but, obviously, given the answers to the mysteries presented, that would never work. In addition, new mysteries were raised at the end of the book that were not answered. It may be that McAuley intended to write a second book, but that left this book with the sense that some things were left hanging.This edition has been lightly edited to make a couple of topographical corrections and fix inconsistencies, continuity glitches and minor rough patches that for the most part are noticeable only to me. Some of the science has dated, as science often does, and we know far Paul’s latest is another book (there’s been a few lately) that begins and makes the reader think they’re reading one type of novel before veering off into a very different story. I'm so irritated at this book. On the one hand, it was quite a cool piece of world building and far-far-future imagining. On the other hand, the ending was so deliberately and pointlessly awful, it ruined the entire book for me. This work by http://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.