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 half feels like a rather meandering prelude that can probably be summed up in one sentence. Things really get cooking in the second, so my advice is to persevere. 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. 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?

Bleh. The book is basically two stories: An unlikable raccoon looking for the truth about the "visitors" (they're exactly who you think they are) and flash forward a few decades then you get an uninspired human looking for bears (but first the map from the first story). You'd think there'd be something interesting over the course of that much time, but no, you'd be wrong. time, some other species might start to look at the stars and wonder. Bears, perhaps. Or raccoons. Perhaps they will manage things better . . .' 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. 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 Clearly, our species has paid the ultimate price for our hubris. The scars of our existence can still be found in places like Ogre’s Grave, but nature recovers—eventually. 200,000 years after our catastrophes, this planet seems to be a fine place. The travels of the main characters provide the opportunity for McAuley to describe a full and vivid natural world, much like our own. Indeed, the extent to which the plot is entwined with a form of travel writing is reminiscent of planetary romance. McAuley’s work more generally often provides a clear sense of place through his description of setting, whether alien worlds, artificial environments or, as here , something very much like our own landscapes. It is the slower pace of travel in this novel, as in 2020’s War of the Maps , that provides a strong sense of the novel being a planetary adventure.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. 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 This work by http://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

I was not completely satisfied. I had hoped for much deeper time, but, obviously, given the answers to the mysteries presented, that would never work. In addition, new mysteries were raised at the end of the book that were not answered. It may be that McAuley intended to write a second book, but that left this book with the sense that some things were left hanging. few dozen miles west of Bognor, but as far as we were concerned it might as well have been on Mars. Amongst others, it featured the Who, the Doors, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimmy Hendrix (one of his last shows; he died of a barbiturate overdose a few weeks later) and Joni Mitchell, who was given an especially hard time by a bellicose crowd What was it like, then? The universe was still somewhat hotter and denser than it is now, and star formation was more intense, but there were stars and recognisable galaxies, even if they were small and irregular or simple spirals rather than elliptical giants like the Milky Way. Given what we know now about the abundance of exoplanets, some of those stars may have 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.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. 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.

Science fiction is not a homogenous genre, even though there is a lot of SF that seems similar. There are the usual near future dystopias, far out space opera's, climate fiction or morality tales set on other planets. And then there are the novels that are about truly exploring new viewpoints and new ideas - conceptual science fiction, one might say. Even though to me this is the core of the genre, and novels like this were prevalent in the 'golden age of SF', now these are few and far between. But I still like stumbling on them.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. 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.

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.A novel of two parts of equal length. Lots of big, intriguing ideas and wonderfully imaginative world-building. I guess my problem is that the author tends to withhold so much from the reader, until a rush of exposition at the end, that it can be a frustrating read.