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

Wilson Tucker - The Year of the Quiet Sun

Plot summary according to Wikipedia:

During a vacation on a Florida beach in the summer of 1978, Brian Chaney, a demographer and biblical scholar, is approached by a woman named Kathryn van Hise. Initially assuming her to be a reporter interested in a controversial book he just published on the Dead Sea scrolls, she informs him that she works for the federal Bureau of Standards and that she is recruiting him for a physical survey of the future via a secretly constructed "TDV" or time displacement vehicle. When Chaney demurs, she informs him that his contract with has been purchased from the think tank where he works, leaving him little choice.

The reluctant Chaney travels by armored train to a military installation south of Joliet, Illinois. There he is teamed with two diversely talented military officers, United States Air Force Major William Moresby and United States Navy Lieutenant Commander Arthur Saltus. Chaney soon finds that he shares with Saltus an attraction to Kathryn, who is their civilian liaison, but unlike Saltus, Chaney lacks the assertiveness to pursue her aggressively. Instead he focuses his attention on the project, which is soon ordered by the President of the United States to embark on their first mission, a trip two years into the future to discover whether he wins the 1980 presidential election.

The three travel to the Thursday after the election on individual trips, with first Moresby and then Saltus going first according to military seniority. Chaney, as a civilian, is the last to leave, but arrives earlier than the others due to a temporal navigation instrument error. They discover that the president, whom Chaney despises as a weak man (in fact, his name is given as "President Meeks"), wins the election in a landslide as a result of his successful handling of ongoing race riots in Chicago, and that these riots have resulted in the building of a wall down the middle of Cermak Road dividing the north of the city from the south. They also learn that the nation is under martial law after a failed attempt by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take over the government by coup d'état, one thwarted because of the advance knowledge the time travelers will bring back of it. While preparing for their return...

In her analysis of the book, Sandra Miesel praised the novel as "an intimate drama of Armageddon played out within the boundaries of Will County, Illinois by a cast of five principals." She noted the way Wilson linked the America of the novel and the Qumran community of ancient Palestine, which are introduced through Chaney's background as a biblical scholar who had published a book on the Dead Sea scrolls prior to the start of the novel. The parallels were made explicit through Biblical motifs that appear throughout the novel, with characters paralleling types out of the Dead Sea scrolls and such apocalyptic imagery as a radioactive Lake Michigan substituting for the lake of fire in the Book of Revelation.

Take a look at Michael K. Smith review of the book in Amazon.com and what he has to say about the author:

"Arthur Wilson Tucker, known throughout science fiction fandom as "Bob," was not a scientist like Asimov or Benford. He was, in fact, a motion picture projectionist from Illinois who wrote mysteries and science fiction stories and novels on the side, beginning in 1941. This book and 'The Lincoln Hunters' are certainly his best (and best known) work, but there was another whole side to him -- the raconteur and noted wit who hung out with the "ordinary" fans at WorldCons, and who held forth at hotel room parties on the benefits of bourbon ("Smoooooth!"), and who cheerfully distributed business cards with only his name on one side and the words "Natural Inseminations" on the reverse".

 
Nobody seems to have enjoyed the book a great  great deal at Amazon reviews but I did. A bit "old", perhaps not too well aged, but charming and funny nevertheless on my opinion. Time travel was a favourite topic of the 70's and it's kind of used nowadays but...