Empty Space: A Haunting

Description

EMPTY SPACE is a space adventure. We begin with the following dream: An alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf star hangs in the middle of nowhere, as a result of an attempt to place it equidistant from everything else in every possible universe. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath its surface, a woman lies on an allotropic carbon deck, a white paste of nanomachines oozing from the corner of her mouth. She is neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. There is something wrong with her cheekbones. At first you think she is changing from one thing into another - perhaps it's a cat, perhaps it's something that only looks like one - then you see that she is actually trying to be both things at once. She is waiting for you, she has been waiting for you for perhaps 10,000 years. She comes from the past, she comes from the future. She is about to speak. . . EMPTY SPACE is a sequel to LIGHT and NOVA SWING, three strands presented in alternating chapters which will work their way separately back to this image of frozen transformation.

Michael John Harrison is the author of, amongst others, the Viriconium stories, THE CENTAURI DEVICE, Climbers, The Course of the Heart, Signs of Life, LIGHT and NOVA SWING. He has won the Boardman Tasker Award (Climbers), the James Tiptree Jr Award (LIGHT) and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (NOVA SWING). He lives in London.

Empty Space is extraordinary. This is Britain s best SF writer at the height of his powers. That sentence also works without SF - Adam Roberts