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. 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. Since 2001, he has produced several SF-based techno-thrillers such as The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, and White Devils. 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 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.

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.

About this book

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.

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 statusAnd 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? 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. first stars that formed in protogalaxies a few hundred light years across were composed entirely of primordial hydrogen and helium. The first half of this novel is catnip for a science fiction reader like me, delivering hints which allow one to build a theory of where, when, and what is going on. The characters have snouts, but on those snouts they sometimes wear glasses. The scholars of this society have, in recent decades, arrived at a theory of selective change. Their more modern trains are powered by batteries, whilst older ones have wood-burning engines. These snippets are strewn across the opening chapters whilst, in the foreground, we are introduced to Pilgrim Saltmire, a servant of a leading scholar, in mourning and keen to continue his employer’s last work. In this society, Pilgrim is unusual because he feels no sexual urges in the annual Season. This provides more insight into his world, adding to growing indications that these “persons,” as they are often described, are quite different from us. Whilst it could have been mere decoration, then, this reference to Pilgrim’s nature makes him subject to prejudice which shapes his character and characterises his world — and which, in due course, becomes directly relevant to the plot. 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.

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 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. The two central characters in Ned Beauman's dark comedy are, broadly, personifications of the commonest reactions to the great thinning of the world's ecosystems: grief and anger. Emotions which in this case are generated by the accidental destruction of what may have been the last breeding grounds of a 'bumpy and greyishMcAuley'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. 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. 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. 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.

The scale of a planet becomes all the more apparent when Pilgrim is exiled to the far south, a place of snowy winters. He is tasked with cataloguing a library abandoned by his tribe some decades before and, through the cold dark winter this task provides intellectual satisfaction amidst physical and social deprivation. In the process he discovers a map which may provide more insight into the visitors, and to a possible connection with the madness of the Bears. However, Pilgrim loses this along with the rest of his research, as events once again over take him. 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. A biologist by training, UK science fiction author McAuley writes mostly hard science fiction, dealing with themes such as biotechnology, alternate history/alternate reality, and space travel. Presumably it’s by design that, at any one point in time, you never feel you have enough information to grasp what’s actually going on. Busy plot, with lots of running around - characters constantly being captured and rescued - without necessarily feeling you’re getting any kind of greater understanding. But maybe I’m just an impatient reader.This edition has been lightly edited to make a couple of topographical corrections and fix inconsistencies, continuity glitches and minor rough patches that for the most part are noticeable only to me. Some of the science has dated, as science often does, and we know far 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