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It is over 200 years since the Great Floods. In the aftermath, as the hurricanes began to subside, years after the floods, it was the Dons from the Isle of Oxford who began to explore the Archipelago. They found scattered survivors, barely human, starving and broken. They organised them, taught them; and slowly the green shoots of civilization began to sprout. Towns were born, then cities, and the Assembly of the Archipelago was established in Darby, at Elvaston Palace, to unite the isles.
And then the Norwegian ships arrived, and among much rejoicing Albion and Norway declared themselves brother nations. But where Albion settled into its Archipelago, Norway pushed ever east and south, planting Ygdrasil wherever it went, until Norway’s empire stretched from far Trondheim in the north, to the Fin Land in the east and the desert on Frans in the south. And now, as the hurricanes wane in the summer months, King Ranult I plans to sail to Greenland.
Dean Adrien Smith rails at the Assembly to steel a march on the Norwegian and send an expedition to colonise Greenland; but he has a deeper purpose – to press further west in his own ship, as far as mythic Eusay to seek the fabled Silicon Valley and there the Soft Ware with which to fire up the Station – the fusion reactor at Lake Bala on the Isle of Wales. With the power of this reactor he will be able to look into the very heart of the universe, his power and knowledge will then be unlimited! But what he finds on his quest in far continent will alter his understanding forever.
Meanwhile, the world the Dons had created is changing, and for the first time in two centuries, conspiracy, war and bloody murder begin to rear their heads…
A brutal world on the edge of catastrophe . . . If an amoral gambler named Jack wants to know what lies ahead, all he has to do is crack the Eden Cypher. Before that happens, people who already know the secret will be happy to see Jack dead--however many times they have to kill him. Vividly written, sardonic and violent. Step into Jack's noirish near future of smothering heat and throbbing menace, where Raymond Chandler meets Blade Runner.
It has been raining dark rain for 35 years, as long as O’Neil has been alive.
The northern hemisphere is a desert of mud and slime in which the vast majority, the Wets, live out their miserable lives and die in the mud, the lucky few, the Drys, live and work in what buildings remain and the elite, the Domers, live in the safety and exquisite luxury of the Domes.
Over this dying world hangs the impending threat of alien invasion.
And then the unthinkable happens.
A Domer is ritually murdered, his living heart cut out of his chest. O’Neil is given charge of the investigation, but the deeper he digs the darker and more sinister his investigation becomes, until the horrific truth is revealed, and the unthinkable murder pales by comparison.
This is a dark, thought provoking portrayal of an all too possible future which moved Professor James Lovelock to describe it as ‘…credible science fiction…’. The pace is tense and unrelenting, the dialogue taut and the imagery haunting. The Magazine described this book as a ‘…future classic…’. They were right.
