Alastair Reynolds - Century Rain

We are in Paris and it is the 50s. Wendell Floyd is an American who came to Paris to become a jazz musician. He still plays, with his partner André Custin but the mostly work as private detectives nowadays. They are hired to investigate the apparent suicide of a young american woman called Susan White. Although Susan is found dead outside her aparment, her landlord does not believe that she jumped.

The next chapter seems to belong to a completely different novel as we find ourselves in a very dissimilar Paris. The whole Earth is abandoned due to a nanotechnological holocaust.


In the mid-2070s, weather control nanomachines were released into Earth's atmosphere and oceans in an attempt to reverse global warming. In late 2076, some of these machines became sentient and stopped obeying orders. In response, more intelligent machines were released in an attempt to control them. By July 2077, a total of eight layers of machines had been released, but the weather continued to get worse. At this point the nanomachines started eating everything in the sea to fuel themselves. They then moved to land, and on 27 July, digested humanity. The only people to survive were those in space habitats. To add insult to injury, fifty years after the Nanocaust all linked digital archives were corrupted, although it is not known whether this was sabotage or an accident.

 
As a result of the Nanocaust and the Forgetting, humans split into two groups, the Threshers and the Slashers. Threshers believe that it should never be able to happen again, and reject the nanotechnology that led to the Nanocaust, preferring to stay on the threshold of dangerous technology, hence their name (a diminution of Thresholders). The Slashers do not believe they should be limited by what happened in the past and embrace new technology. Their official name is the Federation of the Polities, but they trace their existence back to "an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the first computer networks", whose symbol was a slash and a dot.

The Threshers control access to Earth (or what remains of it), the orbiting structure around it known as Tanglewood, and Mars, after a hard-fought war against the Slashers. The Slashers control the rest of the known universe, including access to an ancient portal network that spans the galaxy.

Verity Auger is in this Paris because she's an archaelogist but the dig goes wrong and one of her assistants is killed. She's accused of negligence and must stand trial but is finally manouvered into accepting a high risk assignment, without knowing what it entails. She is taken to a secret underground base on the Martian moon Phobos containing an ancient alien relic that opens a portal to a distant part of the galaxy. At the other end of the portal is an alternate-history version of Earth in the year 1959 - almost 300 years behind the present time - and that she is to retrieve a tin of documents that was left behind by Susan White, an earlier agent sent to "Earth Two", who died under mysterious circumstances.

Via Wikipedia and The SF Site

Via Locus Online:

Alastair Reynolds spent his childhood in Cornwall, England and Wales, before earning degrees in astronomy from England's University of Newcastle (1988), and a PhD from the University of St. Andrew's in Scotland (1991). He sold his first story to Interzone, "Nunivak Snowflakes", in 1989. His notable short fiction includes "A Spy in Europa" (1997), "Galactic North" (1999), and "Great Wall of Mars" (2000) -- which prefigure the future-world space opera of his "Revelation Space" universe, the setting of novels and novellas Revelation Space (2000), British SF Association Award-winner Chasm City (2001), Diamond Dogs (2001), Redemption Ark (2002), Turquoise Days (2002), and Absolution Gap (due October 2003 in the UK and 2004 in the US), which concludes the Inhibitors' story arc of Revelation Space and Redemption Ark. He lives in The Netherlands, where he works for the European Space Agency, and lives with longtime partner Josette Sanchez.Photo by Beth Gwinn


Alastair Reynolds Homepage and his new blog Aproaching Pavonis

Asimov: I'm in Marsport without Hilda

and 13 other detective short stories published in 1968 as a collection under the title "Asimov Mysteries". 

Four stories in the collection feature the character of Wendell Urth, who is a leading extra-terrologist (an expert on alien worlds and life originating on them). Urth is eccentric in that he has a phobia of all mechanical forms of transport (an exaggeration of Asimov's own aversion to flying) but they all have one common feature: detective mysteries showing Asimov theory that science fiction is a literary genre but it can develop into all the popular genres: romantic, western, adventure, terror,... anyone and all of them.

As for this collection, is well known Asimov's passion for detective stories, he never tired of proclaiming his admiration for Agatha Christie, and these stories are selected because they are markedly police & criminal stories, detective stories full of mystery. Most are not convoluted stories, they are not full of red herrings or lacking information, and follow the same general pattern: Asimov raises the mystery or problem -that is clearly stated in the first half- and in the second half the solution is given without further artifice.

 Inside the book you can find:

• "The Singing Bell" (1954, a Wendell Urth story)
• "The Talking Stone" (1955, a Wendell Urth story)
• "What's in a Name?" (1956)
• "The Dying Night" (1956, a Wendell Urth story)
• "Pâté de Foie Gras" (1956)
• "The Dust of Death" (1957)
• "A Loint of Paw" (1957)
• "I'm in Marsport Without Hilda" (1957)
• "Marooned Off Vesta" (1939)
• "Anniversary" (1959, a Multivac story)
• "Obituary" (1959)
• "Star Light" (1962)
• "The Key" (1966, a Wendell Urth story)
• "The Billiard Ball" (1967)

Asimov has always been accused of being a misogynist (women characters are the exception in his work) and prudish. About "I'm in Marsport without Hisda, he says that attempted to pull off that sanbenito, or at least show that he was able to write something "spicy" (and, in my opinion, he failed miserably cause spicy, spicy... he's really prudish, Asimov :)))

But these are very funny stories followed by notes where the author explaines how sometimes science has rendered obsolete or disproved parts of them but he still did not want to change the story because of something as unimportant as reality.