Beyond the Burn Line

Product Information

Beyond the Burn Line is a book of two halves. The first takes us into a far future Earth, where the dominant species, simply referred to as 'people' but clearly not human, live a relatively low tech, but rich life. We discover that they used to be slaves of intelligent bears, who were the main intelligent species on Earth for thousands of years before their relatively recent demise. Humans (referred to as ogres) have been extinct far longer, which, until things are explained further, made the tag line of the book 'What will become of us?' confusing. 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. John Barrow for the SF magazine Interzone (several of his books, notably his collaboration with Frank Tippler, the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, In summary then, as with the best of Paul’s work, Beyond the Burn Line is inventive and smart, engaging and logical. As a reader I found myself caring a great deal about what happens to Pilgrim, his descendants, and their world, until by the end when the story was done, I was sad to find it finished. 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

I don't remember much about those UFO books now. Apart from a few which attempted to give impartial overviews of the phenomenon, most were, like Adamski's book, eccentric personal revelations of

And of course, there are the mysterious and seemingly increasing sightings of the "visitors", the rise of a new cult preaching that they will soon arrive and bring even more prosperity to all and eliminate the wealth and status During the rest of the fortnight I read my way through that shelf, five books at a time, even when the rain stopped and the sun reappeared, just in time for the opening of the third and last Isle 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. 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.

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 In the early universe, the limiting factor for the first appearance of life was not temperature, but availability of water and necessary elements -- carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and so on. A brief universe-wide 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.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 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. 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. 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.