Beyond the Burn Line

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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. I can be entranced by the concept of “Deep Time.” For example, anthropologists now think (or speculate) that human beings were trapped between Siberia and Alaska for “thousands of years,” specifically for ten to twenty thousand years. 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.

And of course, there's a chance that life on Earth is the only life in the universe. That until it arose here on this little blue planet, 10 billion years after the birth of the universe, the universe contained no life at all. But given that all the galaxies in the JWST's grain-of-sand peephole are just a fraction of the two trillion or so galaxies in the universe, each with their several hundred billion stars and several thousand billion planets, how likely is it that the spark of life caught fire only once, in the billions of years following the emission of the red-shifted, gravity-lensed light of the early stars captured in that extraordinary image?

About this book

So far, so good, but there remain some problems. Practically every character in the second half seems to have an ulterior motive, and the main character's actions are repeatedly derailed to an extent that becomes a touch tedious. It is also confusing in places as many characters are introduced briefly, and it becomes difficult to remember who is who amongst the various adversaries and apparent helpers in the repeatedly shifting perspective of the apparent truth. Add in a distinctly frustrating ending, and the reader can emerge a little unsettled. 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. At the end of the first section, the mystery of the Visitors is solved. The second section is set forty years later. The Visitors play the viewpoint role in this section as we discover the answers to the mysteries that Visitors existence are disclosed. This section involves a Visitor who specializes in Visitor-People relations. Those relations have soured. In addition, the question of the plague that overthrew the Bears becomes important.

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. 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. time, some other species might start to look at the stars and wonder. Bears, perhaps. Or raccoons. Perhaps they will manage things better . . .' 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.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. 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 the author of more than twenty books, including novels, short story collections and a film monograph. My latest novel is War of the Maps. The book is divided into two parts. Part One is the story of Pilgrim Saltmire, a sentient raccoon who lives 200,000 years after humanity's extinction. It's also 600 years after the immediate successor to humanity, sentient bears, fell victim to a plague, which will be a key plot point. I found the story and worldbuilding of a society of sentient raccoons to be fascinating and informed by the author's PhD in biology. Also fascinating is that Saltmire is investigating what the late-lamented humans would call UFOs. In the course of this story, we learn that humans have been extinct for “only” two-hundred thousand years and that the intelligent Bears were overthrown by the People eight hundred years before when a plague reduced Bear intelligence and made them feral.