“Saturn returns”

In the first book of Sean Williams's Astropolis, Imre Bergamasc has found himself brought back to life on the outskirts of the Milky Way, but he doesn’t remember how he died. There are lots of things that he has no remembrance of. That’s because the Jinc, a human hive mind, couldn’t find all the pieces of the shattered iron Drum inside of which a recording of his DNA and of his memories had been etched thousands of years before. And why are the galaxy’s communication networks so silent in spite of humanity having spread everywhere without any FTL? Where are the Forts, the great gestalt minds that ran everything? Bergamasc, his body rebuilt into that of a woman, escapes the Jinc before they can make him one of theirs. Thus begins his long journey back to find what had happened, what he had been, and what he had done.

Life would never be extinguished, for somewhere small pockets of civilization would survive. But there would be no return to the glory days of the Continuum. They were gone forever. Humanity in its present form was not fit to rule the galaxy.

“Someone killed the Forts,” he said, feeling the certainty of it in his bones. “They’re still around, and we have to counterattack. We have to find out who the murderers are and stop them from doing any more damage to us. We have to find out how to hurt them.”

“To get even?” she asked, becoming still.

“No,” he said, realizing then that he had been speaking like his old self. That wasn’t what he wanted. “This isn’t about retaliation or justice. It’s about fixing what was broken. It’s about remembering the dead. The Forts would expect better of us, and I think that’s worth aspiring to.”

Part Two, Earth Ascendant, will be released by Ace in early May. And I already have Cenotaxis, a novella published standalone by Monkey Brain, which is set between the two novels. It’s nice to know that there is guaranteed good reading in my near future.