Beyond the Burn Line

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In the deep future beyond the burn line of the Anthropocene and the extinction of humanity, the city states of an intelligent species of bear have fallen to a mind-wrecking plague. At times the lifestyle of these creatures is more enviable than that of the humans, managing a lifestyle on the whole mainly without violence and in keeping with the nature of their planet. It's 2 short stories in a shared universe that have been padded out to novellas with irreverent sidetracks and excessive description.

first stars that formed in protogalaxies a few hundred light years across were composed entirely of primordial hydrogen and helium. From an Aurora Award-winning author, a new sci-fi novel follows three intrepid humans caught up in a conflict that stretches across time and space. The work that Pilgrim wishes to complete is an investigation of “the visitors,” astral beings who are seen by many but with whom no one has ever engaged.what if human reproduction resembled that of insects, with larval forms hatching from eggs, and changing, via pupae, into the adult form? This part is a bit less engaging, being not from the raccoons' point of view, but still quite interesting. It was, and still is, a somewhat low-rent resort, but there was a park with a boating lake, a miniature railway and a small zoo, and a long promenade with a theatre, a pier and miles of sandy beaches from which, on clear days, the misty coast of France could be glimpsed at the horizon.

You'd think there'd be something interesting over the course of that much time, but no, you'd be wrong. Amidst the unpacking at the start of “The Other Mother,” the novel displays considerable subtlety in the sharing and withholding of information, particularly through expectations of viewpoint and narration. It is also confusing in places as many characters are introduced briefly, and it becomes difficult to remember who is who amongst the various adversaries and apparent helpers in the repeatedly shifting perspective of the apparent truth. If there's a comparably-good sequel (or more) that builds on the world created in this book and leads to some sort of conclusion, I'd be comfortable bumping this one's rating up to four stars.

Several of my early novels, and a couple of later ones, involved encounters with aliens whose minds and motives remain teasingly enigmatic* even when (or especially when) they arrive to help us. The first half of this novel is catnip for a science fiction reader like me, delivering hints which allow one to build a theory of where, when, and what is going on. Humanity is extinct, the ruins of its cities fossilised beneath sediments deposited by rising oceans. But the composition of surviving members of the subsequent Population II generation of stars suggests that around a billion years after the Big Bang the universe was still extremely metal-poor; even the oldest Population I stars, formed 2 - 3 billion years later, contain only a tenth of the metal content of youngers stars like our sun. You know, the one about paving paradise to put up parking lots, visiting trees in a tree museum, and saving the birds and bees from DDT.