A four hundred year journey through space is about to end for the teeming inhabitants of a large ship-world. The air is thick with expectation as they enter the system that is to become their new home, the probes reporting nothing more advanced than bacteria and algae among the clustered planets. But the original data was wrong, and direct scans of the planet reveal a whole alien civilisation. Maybe the aliens have just arrived. Maybe evolution has been incredibly rapid during their long journey Neither of these explanations seem plausible. It seems likely that the probe data has been falsified from the beginning. Advice is years distant, help is decades away. They’re on their own and they’ll have to decide a plan of action fast as the rest of humanity is just as vulnerable and not much further away.

Won Prometheus Award in 2006.

Nominated for BSFA Award in 2005.

Nominated for Hugo, Locus, and Campbell awards in 2006.

In the aftermath of the Hard Rapture—a cataclysmic war sparked by the explosive evolution of Earth’s artificial intelligences into godlike beings—a few remnants of humanity managed to survive. Some even prospered.

Lucinda Carlyle, head of an ambitious clan of galactic entrepreneurs, had carved out a profitable niche for herself and her kin by taking control of the Skein, a chain of interstellar gates left behind by the posthumans. But on a world called Eurydice, a remote planet at the farthest rim of the galaxy, Lucinda stumbled upon a forgotten relic of the past that could threaten the Carlyles’ way of life.

For, in the last instants before the war, a desperate band of scientists had scanned billions of human personalities into digital storage, and sent them into space in the hope of one day resurrecting them to the flesh. Now, armed, dangerous, and very much alive, these revenants have triggered a fateful confrontation that could shatter the balance of power, and even change the nature of reality itself.