Terminal World
A great day for sci-fi fans, at least in the UK and Ireland. A new novel by Alastair Reynolds called Terminal World gets released today. Here is a short description of the story.
Spearpoint, the last human city, is an atmosphere-piercing spire of vast size. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different – and rigidly enforced – level of technology. Horsetown is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains . . . Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon’s world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint’s Celestial Levels – and with the dying body comes bad news. If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint’s base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon’s own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality – and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability.
Reynolds, probably best known for his Revelation Space novels, specialises in dark science-fiction, space operas and noir toned stories. As of 2008 he has published over thirty shorter works and nine novels. The inventions and theories described are usually based on his professional expertise with physics and astronomy gained during his involvement with the European Space Research and Technology Centre.
I particularly like his Century Rain, which is set outside the Revelation Space. It’s a noir sci-fi set set partially in the 23rd century and in 1950s Paris.
Twenty-third-century Earth is an uninhabitable wasteland overrun by rogue nanotechnology. When archaeologist Verity Auger, studying the relics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Earth, is accused of reckless endangerment after a child in her care nearly dies, shadowy government forces within her department offer her an out in the form of a mission to retrieve information from somewhere where her knowledge of the mid-twentieth century will be useful. Not until she is well underway do they inpart that her destination is an ALS (anomalous large structure) at the end of a wormhole in which 1950s Earth, slightly changed, is preserved. At that other end of the wormhole, Wendell Floyd is a Parisian PI working a case that gets stranger and more dangerous as he and partner Custine uncover the evidence, which is precisely the information Verity must fetch. The threads come together in a race to save both Earths from extremists, in which Verity and Floyd frantically search for the significance and location of three metal spheres.
Anybody else familiar with Reynolds?