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. I also kept expecting that one of the drives of the story would be everyone finding out where these intelligent species came from, but no. 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.

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 ... 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. 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.

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Meanwhile, I'm accumulating bits and pieces for what might be the next novel: the one I was going to try to write before the plague intervened, and I wrote Beyond the Burn Line instead. This new thing is mostly incomplete scaffolding and some pieces of furniture in storage, but I do have a good opening paragraph, at least. 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?

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 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. first stars that formed in protogalaxies a few hundred light years across were composed entirely of primordial hydrogen and helium.I don't normally mind inconclusive or even cliffhanger endings, but this was just irritating and stupid. Presumably it was intended to be a hook for a sequel, but it didn't make me want to know what happened, it made me want to never read another one of the author's books. Ugg.

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.'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. 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.

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. 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. That is a clue that something is going on which is not natural. Two-hundred thousand years is not enough time for the evolution of a new intelligent species, much less two. There is an explanation for this, but I will not spoil it here. 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.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. 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. 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 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 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.