Book description
The great sunliner 'But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!' is nearing the
end of a four-hundred-year journey. A ship-born generation is tense
with expectation for the new system that is to be their home.
Expecting to find nothing more complex than bacteria and algae, the
detection of electronic signals from one of the planets comes as a
shock. In millennia of slow expansion, humanity has never encountered
aliens, and yet these new signals cannot be ignored. They suspect a
fast robot probe has overtaken them, and send probes of their own to
investigate.
On a world called Ground, whose inhabitants are struggling into the
age of radio, petroleum and powered flight, a young astronomer
searching for distant planets detects an anomaly that he presumes must
be a comet. His friend, a brilliant foreign physicist, calculates the
orbit, only to discover an anomaly of his own.
The comet is slowing down...
Since graduating from Glasgow University in 1976, Ken MacLeod has
worked as a computer analyst in Edinburgh. He now writes full time.
