Ancestral Night
On sale
7th March 2019
Price: £19.99
Genre
A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from multi award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.
Haimey Dz thinks she knows what she wants.
She thinks she knows who she is.
She is wrong.
A routine salvage mission uncovers evidence of a terrible crime and relics of a powerful ancient technology, just as Haimey and her small crew run afoul of pirates at the outer limits of the Milky Way and find themselves both on the run, and in possession of ancient, universe-changing technology.
When the authorities prove corrupt, it becomes clear that Haimey is the only one who can protect her galaxy-spanning civilisation from its potential power – and from the revolutionaries who want to use it to seed terror and war. But doing so will take her from the event horizon of the super-massive black hole at the galaxy’s core to the infinite, empty spaces at its edge. Along the way, she’ll have to uncover the secrets of ancient intelligences lost to time as well as her own lost secrets, which she will wish had remained hidden from her forever . . .
Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling new space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton.
Praise for Elizabeth Bear
‘Gripping, perfectly balanced, and highly recommended’ Kirkus
‘Like the best of speculative fiction, Bear has created a fascinating and complete universe
that blends high-tech gadgetry with Old World adventure and political collusion’ Publishers Weekly
Haimey Dz thinks she knows what she wants.
She thinks she knows who she is.
She is wrong.
A routine salvage mission uncovers evidence of a terrible crime and relics of a powerful ancient technology, just as Haimey and her small crew run afoul of pirates at the outer limits of the Milky Way and find themselves both on the run, and in possession of ancient, universe-changing technology.
When the authorities prove corrupt, it becomes clear that Haimey is the only one who can protect her galaxy-spanning civilisation from its potential power – and from the revolutionaries who want to use it to seed terror and war. But doing so will take her from the event horizon of the super-massive black hole at the galaxy’s core to the infinite, empty spaces at its edge. Along the way, she’ll have to uncover the secrets of ancient intelligences lost to time as well as her own lost secrets, which she will wish had remained hidden from her forever . . .
Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling new space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton.
Praise for Elizabeth Bear
‘Gripping, perfectly balanced, and highly recommended’ Kirkus
‘Like the best of speculative fiction, Bear has created a fascinating and complete universe
that blends high-tech gadgetry with Old World adventure and political collusion’ Publishers Weekly
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Reviews
Awesome, awe-inspiring space opera. Fittingly, it shifts from weighty themes to lighter humour with dexterity, grace and crackling dialogue
Elizabeth Bear is just as comfortable writing steampunk and fantasy as she is hard science fiction, and Ancestral Night, first half of a duology, brims with heady concepts and sleek far-future hardware. There is a mordant wit at work.
This is certainly the best science fiction novel I've read in 2019 so far and I look forward to see how Bear develops the characters and her impressively rich universe.
