Thousandth Night and Minla's Flowers
Alastair Reynolds
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 1596062592
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For many of us, the Ace Double Novels of the 50s and 60s have long been a source both of pleasure and nostalgia. This new double volume from Subterranean Press stands squarely in that distinguished tradition, offering a pair of colorful, fast-paced stories from the reigning master of the intergalactic space opera: Alastair Reynolds.
Thousandth Night, the genesis for the epic novel House of Suns, is quintessential Reynolds. A visionary account of intrigue, ambition, and technological marvels set within a beautifully realized far-future milieu, it combines world-class storytelling with a provocative meditation on the mystery, grandeur, and inconceivable immensity of the universe.
The masterful novella Minla s Flowers features Merlin, a familiar figure to Reynolds s readers. Diverted by technical difficulties to a planet known as Lecythus, Merlin finds himself forced to play a part in the moral and military dilemmas of a world on the verge of extinction.
billion years by the time the Watchers learned its age. And yet the study of the stellar populations in spiral galaxies at different redshifts established that the preconditions for the emergence of intelligent life had been in place for several billion years before the Watchers had evolved, even in the most conservative of scenarios. Were they therefore the first intelligent culture in the universe, or had sentience already arisen in one of those distant spirals? To answer this question, the
and elemental force the way a child might play with sand and water. There was nothing they couldn’t conquer, except time and distance and the iron barrier of the speed of light. At this point in Grisha’s story, Purslane and I looked at each other in a moment of dawning recognition. “Like us,” we both said. Grisha favoured this assessment with a nod. “They were like you in so very many ways. They desired absolute omniscience. But the sheer scale of the galaxy always crushed them. They could
Grisha, I caught a trace of a drive flame exiting the system in the opposite direction. Presumably whoever deployed the machines was still around until then, making sure that the job was done.” “We should be able to match the drive signature to one of the ships parked here,” I said. “I’ve tried, but the detection was too faint. There’s nothing that narrows down my list of suspects.” “Maybe a fresh pair of eyes might help, though,” Purslane said. “Or even two pairs.” “Direct exchange of
sufficiently gentle, it would carry its entire family of worlds and rubble and dust with it. Of all the Prior methods tested so far, none were able to accelerate a sunlike star to anything faster that one percent of the speed of light. This was laughably slow compared to our oldest ships, but it didn’t matter to the Advocates. Even if it took two or three more million years to move all their target stars, this was still a price worth paying. Everything that had happened to date, they liked to
the geometry of the maze underwent a sly modification: walls and gaps moving to block one route and open up another. The more frustrated one became, the more tortuous the labyrinth made itself. Extremes of anger could even cause the maze to form a closed-loop around the hapless player, so that they had no choice but to wander in circles until they calmed down. Needless to say, it was considered very bad form to enter a Mood Maze with anything other than baseline human intelligence. Extreme