▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 464 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook
▸ Author Paul McAuley
▸ Publisher Gollancz
Paul McAuley has moved in recent years between noirinflected SF, climate change near-future fiction and hard SF – respectively Something Coming Through, Austral and War Of The Maps. If there’s a unifying thread, it’s the theme of people struggling in the aftermath of civilisational breakdown. But rather than write dreary dystopias, McAuley is interested in what happens next after things go awry.
This idea is to the fore in Beyond The Burn Line – the title a reference to evidence of the Anthropocene left hundreds of thousands of years ago by mankind’s demise. Mother Earth has recovered and its primary species are peaceful, honourable and in the early stages of creating an industrial civilisation.
It’s a society we see through the eyes of Pilgrim Saltmine, an academic and outsider determined to complete his late master’s research into strange stories of visitors and sky craft – research that leads him out of a cloistered existence and
