I have the great good luck to be able to thank a whole village of people who saved my life: Mr Austin O’Bichere, his surgical team, and the doctors, nurses and staff of the chemotherapy unit of University College Hospital. My profound gratitude to all of them, and to my partner, Georgina Hawtrey-Woore. If it hadn’t been for their treatment, care and support I would not have survived to write this novel.
My thanks also to Simon Spanton and Marcus Gipps for editing suggestions, Nick Austin for his thorough and lucid copy-editing, and Simon Kavanagh at the Mic Cheetham Literary Agency for his help, support, and coffee hit points.
I first read about the epic of Pabuji, and the Story of the She-Camels, in William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives. The poem ‘I shall not coil my tangled hair . . .’ is adapted from a traditional song of the Baul minstrels of Bengal. ‘On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances’ is a line from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem ‘On The Seashore.’
'On October 24, 2012, Bibi Mamana and her grandchildren were gathering firewood or picking okra outside their home. They may have been in a field. Perhaps it was a militant compound with a weapons depot. 2 missiles were fired, killing Mamana and up to 5 other people, injuring 6 to 8 of the children. Some other men, maybe 3, maybe militants, may have been caught in the blast. A house and a car may or may not have been destroyed. Either 3 cows or 1 buffalo and 2 goats were also killed. The drones remained overhead and 5 to 7 minutes after the first strike more missiles fell.
'This moment—the drones, the missiles, the people, the livestock—is a node in a vast network. It spans the globe, connecting villages to secret installations to office parks to seats of government. It reaches backwards for millenia and will resonate forwards for untold centuries. To trace it out completely is impossible. We are hampered by its size and by the fact that much of it is hidden behind classified protections and some of the rest is barely recorded at all.
'This is an attempt to understand the geography of a drone strike.'
Paul McAuley's Quiet War series (The Quiet War, 2008; Gardens of the Sun, 2009; plus the discontinuous but related In the Mouth of the Whale in 2012, and a bunch of stories) are among the defining works of the notable renascence of solar system fiction in the last decade or so, and McAuley's evident passion for extrapolating the surface and subsurface details of the various gas-giant moons and myriad artificial habitats he calls "gardens" is a good indicator of the appeal of such settings: we have just enough hard astronomical data to understand the challenges for a hard SF writer, but with plenty of room for narrative tooling around. In Benford's playing-with-the-net-up metaphor, we at least have a good idea of where the net is, and writing planetary fiction about worlds that we know something about must seem like a kind of formal constraint, a kind of hard-SF version of sonnets or villanelles. At times, McAuley appeared so enamored with working out these settings that the detailed planetology interrupted his already complex, multiviewpoint narratives, but in Evening's Empires he uses the settings quite effectively as a backdrop for a classic revenge-and-redemption space opera focusing on a single character's quest, and which pointedly pays tribute to a broad swath of SF history. Part of the fun of reading it is name-checking those homages - section titles borrowed from Asimov, Clarke, Godwin, and Silverberg, locations named Trantor and Tannhauser Gate, a scene of man-apes capering before a giant monolith, even a couple of swooping flying-scooter chases worthy of Star Wars set pieces . . .
McAuley is having a good deal of fun laying out what amounts to a tribute to classic space opera, and Evening's Empires, while not lacking in the snazzy mise-en-scene spectacle or the philosophical debates of the earlier novels, is the most purely enjoyable straight adventure tale in the Quiet War series so far.
I won't even pretend to be impartial about the work of Paul McAuley. I bought and published lots of it when I was editor of Asimov's and reprinted other stories in my Best of the Year series, both before and after my stint at Asimov's. Suffice it to say that I consider McAuley to be one of the two or three best writers working in SF today, and believe some of the stories collected in A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011, especially "The Temporary King", "Gene Wars", "Recording Angel", "Second Skin", "17", "Sea Change, With Monsters", "City of the Dead", and "The Choice" to be among the best science fiction stories published by anyone in this period, not just the best of Paul McAuley.
Dr Gagarian was a tall skinny tick-tock person some three hundred years old. His jointed carapace of black fibrogen resembled an ambulatory pressure suit or an animated man-sized insect; his major organs had been replaced by machine equivalents; his brain was laced with neural nets that formed a kind of shadow mind that stored his every thought and reaction; his eyes were dull white stones in a leathery inexpressive face. A remote, forbidding figure. Inhuman, barely mammalian. In an age where there was very little philosophical investigation, and most of that was theoretical, he was an incredibly rare beast: an experimental physicist. For the past twenty years, he and his small crew of collaborators had been attempting to identify, measure and define changes in the fine grain of space-time caused by the passing of the Bright Moment. Pabuji’s Gift, whose exploration of remote ruins often took it far from the background noise of human civilisation, was an ideal platform for his latest experiments, and its store of ancient machines and the debris of half a hundred clades and cultures provided useful components for his experiment apparatus.
Nabhomani believed that Dr Gagarian was a charlatan. A magician disguised as a philosopher, consumed by a fantasy of mastering secret powers. Nabhoj and Agrata had little time for Dr Gagarian’s experiments, either. But Aakash was convinced that the tick-tock philosopher and his collaborators were engaged on a hugely important project.
‘We are able to make a living from mining the past because so many of the old technologies have been forgotten,’ he told Hari. ‘Baseliners have given up on philosophy, and posthuman clades prefer theory to application. We live in an age that cannibalises its past because it has lost faith in its future. But with our help, Dr Gagarian and his friends will change that. We will be at the root of a great new flowering of practical philosophy. Think of what we will be able to do, once we master the principles that created the Bright Moment! New kinds of communication devices. Unlimited computational capacity within the metrical frame of space-time. New technologies, Hari. New technologies and new ideas.’
'Will we be rich?’ Hari said.
‘Everyone will be enriched,’ Aakash said. ‘That’s the important thing. Everyone will benefit, and everyone will be enriched.’
"The novel is a gesture art. We don’t need to know more about Mr Bingley’s body than that he’s ‘wonderfully handsome’, or (at first) that Hans Castorp looks like ‘an ordinary young man’. We couldn’t describe them to a police sketch artist and expect to get anything back. Gatsby, first spotted, is ‘standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr Gatsby himself’ – that’s it – while Daisy’s face is ‘sad and lovely with bright things in it’. We project, we fill in. Some writers hardly seem to give their characters bodies at all, or can’t make up their minds about them: Emma Bovary’s eyes are black in one chapter, in other chapters brown or blue."From Deborah Friedell's review of Lionel Shriver's Big Brother, London Review of Books.
