Life After Wartime

My Amazon review - http://www.amazon.com/review/R1I0QJJKWQH91B/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Marvelous anthology that plays out its future history in the context of real people in a wonderfully imagined future.

Paul McAuley is a new writer to me. Since he has been turning out stories since the 1990s, the fault is mine. He has a knack for turning out beautiful prose that advances the story, rather than simply adorning it.

Consider this:

“Sky Saxena was one such, a clever, headstrong man in his early twenties. After fleeing from his family and the obligations of his inheritance, he had decided to impose shape and order on his life by attempting to walk around the largest of Saturn's regular, icy moons – Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Iapetus. A quest only a celebrated few had completed since the Saturn system had first been settled more than four centuries ago.”

Or this:

“Rickasht found he didn't mind the crowd, the noise. He could disappear inside it. Nothing was expected of him. He smiled and nodded as two young, earnest men told him that they were going to tent over and landscape an embayment in one of the long, deep canyons that cut the icy surface of Uranus's largest moon, Titania.”

Who wouldn't want to live in a time where such things were possible?

As those excerpts also suggest, McAuley also has a talent for making his settings feel lived in. Most of the stories in this anthology are set in the icy moons around Jupiter and Saturn. One story features a woman whose job is fighting created monsters in the briny ocean that exists under the ice of Europa.

These stories are set in a time period ranging from shortly after the Quiet War to much further into the future. Since I am new to McAuley's universe I only know what the Quiet War is from the hints dropped in the story: apparently, the outer satellites rebelled and were defeated and occupied by the Three Powers, one of which was Brazil. In the course of the war, the Three Powers employed bio-weapons of radically different types. (“Sea Change, with Monsters” and “Dead Men Walking.”)

McAuley's stories range from almost-novella length (Sea Change) to the briefest of short stories. Some of these short stories are only a page or two in length, and seem to more of a story idea, but they work. I liked them all, but “Barbara Allen and Sweet Billie” is a nice example of a spare, romantic style that suggests the frontier era that McAuley is painting, where small things among a small population can be the stuff of legend.

McAuley speckles his writing with ideas that take the mind in different directions, “eidolons” deliver messages, “vacuum organisms” create an ecological system on barren ice planets, pioneers jump from “kobold” to “kobold” in the Oort cloud to move further and further away from Earth, and people achieve immortality by destroying the brain as they transfer its data to an artificial intelligence system.