Beyond the Burn Line

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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. Then turn your attention to the Beringerian Standstill – twenty-thousand years! Three times as long as we have history. For three times longer than earliest pharaohs, there was a population of humans that could not leave this godforsaken sliver of land. Eventually, they did, at which time they populated North America.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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Beyond the Burn Line shows us what a skilled writer can do. Imaginative, intelligent world building, with a far-future setting that allows our characters, whilst different, to exhibit endearingly human traits. It is going to be one of my books of the year, I think. John Barrow for the SF magazine Interzone (several of his books, notably his collaboration with Frank Tippler, the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 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 is in the second part of the book that Paul’s long game is revealed. There is a change in style and tone in this latter part of the novel. If I had to compare Beyond the Burn Line here, too, then Part Two is rather like Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, or Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia, in its descriptions of an evolving, uplifted society and their connection to other species.

The philosopher Timothy Horton described global heating, climate change species loss and all the other upheavals of the Anthropocene, as hyperobjects 'massively distributed in space and time relative to humans'. Although we can see evidence for their existence, the totality of these hyperobjects is much harder -- if not impossible -- to comprehend, and attempting to depict them from the default close third person point-of-view presents obvious difficulties for the novelist. One solution is to distribute the story amongst multiple characters scattered across time, a technique used to fine effect in E.J. Swift's novel about three women who in different centuries observe the unspoiled beauty and the decline and fall of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. 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. 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.After the death of his master, a famous scholar, Pilgrim Saltmire vows to complete their research into sightings of so-called visitors and their sky craft. To discover if they are a mass delusion created by the stresses of an industrial revolution, or if they are real—a remnant population of bears which survived the plague, or another, unknown intelligent species. 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. And so it seems to go, only for the story to take an unexpected turn and lead to Pilgrim's most important discovery which seems to suggest that recent history including the fall of the Bears civilization to plague and the rise of the people to their peaceful but definitely materially and technologically progressing society along the lines of the long ago Ogres civilization, though hopefully this time without violating Mother (Earth) so inviting her brutal response that led the Ogres to extinction, is actually not quite as in the official histories preserved in the vast Library of the People where Pilgrim worked for so long. time, some other species might start to look at the stars and wonder. Bears, perhaps. Or raccoons. Perhaps they will manage things better . . .'

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 Where do writers get their ideas? Anywhere and everywhere they can. In the case of Beyond the Burn Line, it began with something so slight it barely qualified as the ghost of a notion. A throwaway remark by a minor character in one of my earlier novels, The Quiet War, who wonders, as nations struggle to fix the damage to ecosystems caused by previous generations, if Earth might not be better off without humans. ‘In When Pilgrim goes in search of an ancient map that is taken from him, one that hints of a world where the feral bears may have had cities in the past and a connection to the strange alien ogres, the more modern wider world beyond Pilgrim’s town of Highwater Reach reveals itself to be somewhat steampunkish, with train travel, printing presses and balloons. 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. 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.

In the nineteenth century, before the onset of the Anthropocene and global heating, Judith persuades her father to allow her to join his survey expedition of coral islands along the length of the reef. In the present, Hanna, a marine biologist trying to find ways to save the reef from climate change while coming to terms with the break-up of a relationship, becomes involved in the mystery of Coral Man, whose white-painted body is found adrift in an inflatable painted with a message: This is what it looks like when coral dies. And in a future where the interior of Australia is a hostile furnace and most of the reef is dead, Telma sets out along the coral ruins to investigate rumours of a seemingly impossible sighting of an extinct fish species. The characters are quite interesting too, the structure of the "people" society and their biology is well thought out, though, for most of the storyline, Pilgrim and his friends and companions are not that distinguishable from human characters as per master Able's theory above 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 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. 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.