Eternal Light

From AwardAnnals

Book:	Eternal Light
Author:	Paul J. McAuley
Honors:	1992 Clarke shortlist Score: 6.42
Genres:	Science Fiction books Fantasy books Speculative Fiction books
Publisher:	Orion Publishing Group

For Dorthy Yoshida—abused earthborn Talent and prime player in the secret history of the galaxy—the seeds of destiny were sown a million years in the past…when a giant sun exploded and vast civilizations died in the subsequent blood feuding of ten thousand alien family nations. Or perhaps it all began a dozen years before her birth—when a Greater Brazilian flyby drone was destroyed above a red dwarf star, drawing an uncomprehending human race into a thousand-millennia-old genocidal conflict that was not their own.

And now Dorthy’s extraordinary mental ability to touch the past and the future has made her the pawn of a wealthy immortal’s vengeance—rocketing her to the black hole at the core of the galaxy, and into the perilous heart of a fanatical religious sect’s relentless search for hidden gods. For it is here that the final battle must ultimately be fought against a fearsome, invisible Enemy who has harnessed the powers of creation to obliterate a universe. And it is Dorthy Yoshida who stands at the frontlines of the war for tomorrow—unknowingly possessing the answers to the mysteries of eternity…and the key to preventing the apocalyptic unraveling of space and time.

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Reviews

Amazon.com

With this, his third novel, Paul J. McAuley stopped being merely promising and entered the front rank of British SF authors. The galactic backdrop already visited in his earlier books Four Hundred Billion Stars and Secret Harmonies here opens out at huge and exhilarating scale. Our galaxy is infested with quarrelling factions of the irrationally hostile alien Alea, against whose colonies the crumbling and partly decadent human Federation wages a depressing, genocidal war of self-defence. Now an anomalous star travelling at daunting speed has arrived from the galactic core and offers rapid wormhole transit to the centre—where ambitious Alea are building the most gigantic habitats in SF, hyperstructures light-years across. This project’s use of energies from outside the universe endangers the cosmos: “Something is rubbing the fabric of space-time thin enough to allow creation to shine through.” Only pure mathematical weaponry supplied by advanced “angels” from a fractal reality can stop the unravelling of space. But the ramshackle human mission to the core is beset by strife, religious fanaticism, greed and mutiny, and looks set for bloody failure even before the Alea unleash their own superweapon. A rich, crowded novel that combines exotic descriptions, slam-bang action and a mind-blowing secret history of the universe. —David Langford