You can find this in Belladonna Nights and Other Stories

Sadly, i lost the review of this book when my old website died.   But rest assured it’s great, as is the rest of the trilogy.

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This follows Thousandth Night and is before Belladonna Nights in the trilogy.

One word: genius.

This book is superb from beginning to end, and it also leaves it open for a good follow on at some time in the future if Alastair feels like continuing the series at some point. I certainly hope he does.

Not only does this book demonstrate Alastair’s knowledge as a physicist, but it also demonstrates his incredible imagination and writing skills.

If you want a taster of Alastair at his best and you don’t want to go through all of Revelation Space just yet, then i suggest reading the House of Suns trilogy, sci-fi fans won’t be disappointed.

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Originally published in One Million A.D., and also available in the collection, Beyond the Aquila Rift.

It soooo good to be back from all that multi-universe nonsense and into some real sci-fi from Alastair once again.

This story is superb.   Essentially, it’s fracture yourself into one thousand clones, known collectively as a “line”, and send them off on a trip around the galaxy to see what they can discover.   At the end of the trip all the clones meet up a pre-determined place and time and download each other’s holiday journal, known as a “thread”, into their own minds.   Whoever is determined the best thread gets to decide on the location and setting of the next reunion after the next trip around the galaxy.

There’s quite a few rules and a fair bit of etiquette to all this to keep things interesting and sensible, but when some people don’t appear to be playing by the rules and conforming to the etiquette, others start to have suspicions.

I really like the idea of this and if you do too you’ll be happy to know that House of Suns is next in the trilogy with Belladonna Nights straight afterwards, so there’s plenty more still to come.

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Available in the collections, Beyond the Aquila Rift and Deep Navigation.

Another one i lost the review of when my old website crashed.   I seem to remember it being quite good.

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You’ll find this in Deep Navigation.

Yet another one of Alastair’s parallel universe, ridicilous nonsense stories.   Utter rubbish, to put it mildly.

I live in hope that he will soon get over this bizarre phase in his bibliography.   Next up in the timeline is The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter, and i think i’ll throw my Kindle across the room if there’s even a hint on one single parallel universe, let alone an infinite number of them.

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Originally published in Galactic Empires

More of that parallel universe nonsense that Alastair is obviously having a thing for during this period of his writing: 2006/2007.   Fingers crossed it should be over soon and we can get back to some proper good sci-fi.

The next story from Alastair’s timeline will be The Fixation.

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You’ll find this in Deep Navigation.

It seems that someone’s been leaking top secret information from a top secret facility in a different reality and a detective is sent to investigate.   The only problem being that the only way to get there is to have his consciousness uploaded and sent by signal and then put into a new body at the other end: exactly like in Altered Carbon.   But for some reason the detective finds himself re-sleeved into a bit cat’s body: hence the title Tiger, Burning.

Really good, Alastair at his best, as usual.

Next up in Alastair’s timeline will be Signal to Noise, from 2006.

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You’ll find this in the collection, Deep Navigation.

Reading this, one wonders if Alastair once had an academic paper rejected and that this is somehow a therapy session.   There doesn’t seem to be much more to it.

Dyson spheres: a wonderful trope for story telling, but the idea that an actual intelligent society capable of such feats would go to all that trouble simply because they can’t control their urges to continually fuck up the front hole, producing ever expanding colonies of the results of the misguided sexual desires, just because a few seriously backward thinking Homo sapiens can’t see beyond their own retarded thinking and retarded sexual desires, is preposterous.

And the idea that we should be judging the amount — and level — of intelligent species in the galaxy on the amount of Dyson spheres we can detect is even more preposterous.   Just one more example of the arrogance of Homo sapiens.

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Another one of those super long 10000+ Loc point novels that Alastair seems to enjoy writing.

The story starts with an ice pusher, named Rockhopper. Rockhopper is a big space ship that finds valuable comets, etc., around the solar system, attaches big mass drivers to them and pushes them wherever they’re needed in the solar system for their materials: ergo “Pushing Ice”. It just so happens that Rockhopper ends up as the only space ship owned by the big corporations that is capable of catching up with one of Saturn’s moons that has just decided to fly away from Saturn and the rest of the solar system.

And thus begins the big chase, with mutinies, murders, aliens, and all kinds of other mayhem thrown in for good measure: did i mention there’s 10000+ Loc points of this?

It does begin fairly slow going but as you go along it all picks up speed as the stakes become higher and higher and by the last third of the book i was in couldn’t-put-it-down mode, turning pages at any brief opportunity life presented.

Super good, and it’s also left very well open for another episode should Alastair ever wish to let us have some more: please can we have some more, Alastair?

And next book on the Alastair time line will be Feeling Rejected, from 2005.

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