Beyond the Burn Line

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I'm the author of more than twenty books, including novels, short story collections and a film monograph. My latest novel is War of the Maps. 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. Then turn your attention to the Beringerian Standstill – twenty-thousand years! Three times as long as we have history. For three times longer than earliest pharaohs, there was a population of humans that could not leave this godforsaken sliver of land. Eventually, they did, at which time they populated North America. 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. Science fiction is not a homogenous genre, even though there is a lot of SF that seems similar. There are the usual near future dystopias, far out space opera's, climate fiction or morality tales set on other planets. And then there are the novels that are about truly exploring new viewpoints and new ideas - conceptual science fiction, one might say. Even though to me this is the core of the genre, and novels like this were prevalent in the 'golden age of SF', now these are few and far between. But I still like stumbling on them.

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. PDF / EPUB File Name: Beyond_the_Burn_Line_-_Paul_McAuley.pdf, Beyond_the_Burn_Line_-_Paul_McAuley.epub I think the thing that gets me is that it seemed to be very intentional and I just don't understand what purpose it served. They call themselves people, and certainly deserve the name. They are, with some significant exceptions, curious, peaceable, likeable and inventive. But they are not human. Pilgrim Saltmire is one of these (a mole, or badger, or what-you-will), a young academic determined to finish the monograph of his dear departed master, Able. Meanwhile, I'm accumulating bits and pieces for what might be the next novel: the one I was going to try to write before the plague intervened, and I wrote Beyond the Burn Line instead. This new thing is mostly incomplete scaffolding and some pieces of furniture in storage, but I do have a good opening paragraph, at least.McAuley’s eccentric retread of late 19th-century science (Saltmire’s kind are just wrapping their furry heads around the concept of adaptation through natural selection) provides the intellectual framework for a spirited tale of travel, manners and professorial skulduggery ... McAuley is not a showy writer, but his fiendishness gets under your skin.'

Later the story moves along some decades in the future and switches again in perspective, though Pilgrim's discoveries are still its main focus. The second part is by its nature much faster-paced than the first and at times this makes it seems a bit rushed especially towards the ending which solves the main mysteries at least to a large extent, though as in any good story, leaves enough hooks for a possible sequel. 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. 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. The first novel by poet J.O. Morgan, Pupa is set in an alternate world predicated on a single what if? -- what if human reproduction resembled that of insects, with larval forms hatching from eggs, and changing, via pupae, into the adult form? Sal is a larval who tells himself he is content with his lot. He's an unambitious office drone with a necessarily unrequited friendship with another larval, Megan, and has no intention of willing the potentially fatal transformation to adulthood. As he tells Megan, 'You can't know if you'll like how you'll turn out.' But by a single uncharacteristic act, he precipates Megan's decision to change, and puts his own assumptions to the test.

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And 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. 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. Paul McAuley dives into the deep future in his latest novel. Humanity is gone, mysterious Ogres fallen victim to climate change and their own hubris. Uplifted bears have risen and fallen once more. Their fall to barbarism has freed their slaves, racoons also modified by the whims of lost humanity. 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.

I can be entranced by the concept of “Deep Time.” For example, anthropologists now think (or speculate) that human beings were trapped between Siberia and Alaska for “thousands of years,” specifically for ten to twenty thousand years.So far, so good, but there remain some problems. Practically every character in the second half seems to have an ulterior motive, and the main character's actions are repeatedly derailed to an extent that becomes a touch tedious. It is also confusing in places as many characters are introduced briefly, and it becomes difficult to remember who is who amongst the various adversaries and apparent helpers in the repeatedly shifting perspective of the apparent truth. Add in a distinctly frustrating ending, and the reader can emerge a little unsettled. When Pilgrim goes in search of an ancient map that is taken from him, one that hints of a world where the feral bears may have had cities in the past and a connection to the strange alien ogres, the more modern wider world beyond Pilgrim’s town of Highwater Reach reveals itself to be somewhat steampunkish, with train travel, printing presses and balloons. I don't normally mind inconclusive or even cliffhanger endings, but this was just irritating and stupid. Presumably it was intended to be a hook for a sequel, but it didn't make me want to know what happened, it made me want to never read another one of the author's books. Ugg. I have to give this a very mixed review. On the one hand, it's got a lot of the sort of thing I like, especially non-human intelligences. On the other hand, it keeps building to a dramatic peak or reveal, and then ... skips to years/decades later. John Barrow for the SF magazine Interzone (several of his books, notably his collaboration with Frank Tippler, the Anthropic Cosmological Principle,