James Nicoll Reviews

Paul McAuley’s 2022 Beyond the Burn Line is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

Six hundred thousand years before the time of the novel, the ogres failed so egregiously to properly caretake the Earth that scorch marks are still visible in the geological record. The ogres were replaced by the cruel but capable bears, whose domination of their home continents lasted for thirty millennia. Six centuries ago, the bears fell to madness, leaving their domain in the hands of their former Procyonic slaves. In the six centuries since, the citizens of the Union and United Territories have done their best to follow an equitable and prudent course that will steer them away from the fates of ogre- and bear-kind.

The first signs that unexpected transformation is coming arrives in the form of an academic puzzle.

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Paul McAuley’s 2020 War of the Maps is a thus-far standalone science fiction novel.

Fearing the consequences should Remfrey He, the Free State’s greatest evil mastermind, be allowed to roam free unchecked, a retired lawman — the lucidor — sets out on an extremely unauthorized, one-man mission to track down his old enemy. 

The world the lucidor must traverse is one vaster and stranger than our familiar Earth.

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1988’s Four Hundred Billion Stars was Paul J. McAuley’s debut novel. It was followed by 1989’s Of the Fall (US title: Secret Harmonies), a prequel set some centuries earlier than Four Hundred Billion Stars. In 1991 McAuley published Eternal Light, a direct sequel to this novel. 

The invention of the phase graffle re-opened contact between the Earth and its abandoned colonies. A few decades later, the Federation for Co-Prosperity of Worlds stumbled across an alien civilization living on and among the asteroids orbiting the red dwarf BD+20^o 2465. The aliens are unrelentingly hostile; they are known as the enemy. Ever since contact was made, the Federation and the enemy have been locked in war. 

Astronomer Dorthy Yoshida has no interest in matters military, but her telepathic gift makes her an intelligence asset too precious to the Navy to squander on pure research. The asocial scientist is drafted into the war effort. 

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