I still have a few of them -- John Jake's Asylum World, Clifford Simak's All the Traps of Earth and other stories, Theodore Sturgeon's A Way Home -- but most were lost to moves and years of strategic winnowing, including the only non-fiction title I bought, back then. When I read a Paul McAuley book, I always feel like I've read a new story, not something that kind of reminds me of something else written by someone else. The actual last page may disappoint some as the author pulls a trick that is quite effective when it works, and I actually really liked it and found it very appropriate. The scale of a planet becomes all the more apparent when Pilgrim is exiled to the far south, a place of snowy winters. 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.

With its talk of notaries and supplicants, it felt almost Dickensian, a point compounded by the fact that our hero Pilgrim Saltmire is a secretary to Master Able, recently deceased, but also a scholar and a curator of books. Allegedly shipped across the Atlantic as ballast, there were a scattering of science fiction novels and story collections amongst the florid romances and remaindered copies of Thrilling Detective Stories. This edition has been lightly edited to make a couple of topographical corrections and fix inconsistencies, continuity glitches and minor rough patches that for the most part are noticeable only to me.A title whose slight pun wouldn't, my then-editor Malcolm Edwards said, be appreciated by British readers; and thus the title change.

It takes place 200,000 years in the future after the decimation of our human civilization, beyond the burn line.In a lonely village in the Peak District, during the onset of a once-in-a-lifetime snow storm, Constable Ellie Cheetham finds a body. Paul’s latest is another book (there’s been a few lately) that begins and makes the reader think they’re reading one type of novel before veering off into a very different story.