Secret Harmonies by Paul McAuley (400 Billion Stars #2)

Secret Harmonies by Paul McAuley (400 Billion Stars #2)

This can be read independently of the first book in the series but they do share a similar background theme.

Elysium has been colonised by humans, most of the first colonists where from Australia so the wilderness beyond the human inhabited areas is the Outback. The indigenous population of near human looking creatures are called Aborigines and going out on your own into the Outback is called ‘going dingo’.

Port of Plenty, the first city to be built by the colonists has strict laws about where new colonists can go, build and even what they can and cannot do. All the towns around Port of Plenty are mainly there to supply food, labour and anything else the citizens of Port of Plenty might need. Of course there has been rumblings among these outer communities about the way the authorities run everything. Underpinning the authorities is an AI called Constat that monitors every detail of human life on the planet.

Every few years a colony ship arrives from earth with new colonists. Everyone is gathering to celebrate the expect arrival of the latest colony ship but it does not arrive as expected. A civil war breaks out after no news is heard from Earth about the lost colony ship.

The story follows Miguel who has ‘gone dingo’ who survives in the Outback by scavenging food where he can and Richard who is a university DR. Their lives seem very separate. Miguel has been taken over and controlled by something he calls the blue brother. It guides him to do his bidding. Richard finds himself enrolled in the city volunteer defence force, a position he really does not like.

Secret Harmonies is another cracking read by McAuley. All the SF you could want without being overwhelming. A strong storyline with well rounded characters. A civil war that seems unfathomable to comprehend until the final 50 or so pages when a lot becomes clearer yet you do not feel as if you missed out by not knowing earlier.

A very good read.

My review of 400 Billion Stars (400 Billion Stars #1)

Austral by Paul McAuley

Austral by Paul McAuley

Anticipated Publication Date, October 15, 2017

Before I go any further I want to say that I really enjoyed this. I read it in four chunks of time over the course of five days. I could have probably read it over a shorter timespan but there is so much within this that makes you sit back and think that I had to do just that!

Austral is a genetically modified human living in the not too distant future. A future where climate change is slowly wrecking our planet (recognise anything?). The ice caps are melting at tremendous rates and Antarctica is now inhabitable. She is the child of environmentalists that are attempting to make Antarctica inhabitable and a place where wildlife can flourish.

There is no mention of the Northern Hemisphere whatsoever but even countries like Australia, Argentina and Chile are much smaller because of the rise in sea levels.

After all the ecological good Austral’s family and those like her have tried to do, money, greed, capitalism and the desire to have goods, the Antarctic government decide that these environmentalists are outlaws. They get hunted down and sent to an island where they can barely sustain life, but they do.

The story is Austral’s attempt to tell her daughter her story. We see things through Austral’s eyes, her emotions and motivations. At times it is meandering stream of conscious thoughts, at other times it is almost a thriller as life continues.

Much of the internal story is quite relevant and is one possibility of where humans and the planet could go if something on a planetary scale is not done to try and slow down, maybe even reverse the ecological disaster that looms in this future. It is not a very happy story either, the ending has hope but little more.

This is going to be hard to categorise but it is sort of an eco-scifi-dystopia, not one or the other but all three.

Definitely gets my recommendation!

I would like to thank Gollancz and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this digital galley version for review

400 Billion Stars by Paul McAuley

400 Billion Stars by Paul McAuley.

Dorthy is an empath and she can read minds. After going to a special school where they have implanted a controlling device that prevents her from being bombarded by everyone's thoughts she goes on to train as an astrologer. Her empathic talent can only be activated by a pill she takes if necessary.

The human race has expanded to cover several systems and is now at war with an enemy that evades capture to the point of destroying ships and even worlds if it looks like they will be captured. In its ever expanding search for new planets, the space navy discovers a new and rather oddly located planet which for the most part looks uninhabited but lower life forms are discovered. Again after much scientific research, nothing is discovered about this seemingly harmless lifeform.

Dorthy is conscripted into the scientific team to see if she can gain any new insight through her empath talent as some theories seem to point to this lifeform might be an ancestor of the humans enemy. She does not want to be there and hates it but gets on with her job.

Although rather slow this is a brilliant story of human civilisations expansion, discovery of other worlds and lifeforms. There is some good hard science fiction as well. The human characters aren’t easy to like whereas the newly discovered lifeforms seem to simply exist with no real meaning to their lives, so they gender no emotional feeling in this reader.

This is the first of the 400 Billion Stars trilogy by McAuley