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Something Coming Through (English Edition) Kindle Ausgabe
The aliens are here. And they want to help. The extraordinary new project from one of the country's most acclaimed and consistently brilliant SF novelists of the last 30 years.
The Jackaroo have given humanity fifteen worlds and the means to reach them. They're a chance to start over, but they're also littered with ruins and artifacts left by the Jackaroo's previous clients.
Miracles that could reverse the damage caused by war, climate change, and rising sea levels. Nightmares that could forever alter humanity - or even destroy it.
Chloe Millar works in London, mapping changes caused by imported scraps of alien technology. When she stumbles across a pair of orphaned kids possessed by an ancient ghost, she must decide whether to help them or to hand them over to the authorities. Authorities who believe that their visions point towards a new kind of danger.
And on one of the Jackaroo's gift-worlds, the murder of a man who has just arrived from Earth leads policeman Vic Gayle to a war between rival gangs over possession of a remote excavation site.
Something is coming through. Something linked to the visions of Chloe's orphans, and Vic Gayle's murder investigation. Something that will challenge the limits of the Jackaroo's benevolence ...
- SpracheEnglisch
- HerausgeberGollancz
- Erscheinungstermin19. Februar 2015
- Dateigröße2096 KB
Kunden, die diesen Artikel gekauft haben, kauften auch
Produktbeschreibungen
Pressestimmen
McAuley's latest is smart, it's challenging, and as an exploration of the social consequences of sudden science fictional change, it's very impressive indeed (SFX)
The action, slow to get going, builds to a dramatic climax of chases and shoot-outs. Crime-tinged SF at its canniest. (The Financial Times)
What really lifts the book out of the ordinary though, is the Jackaroo...The Jackaroo are an enduring mystery that will get readers back for the next instalment. (The Register)
It's difficult to find fault with this book - there are a strong cast of characters, enigmatic aliens, a well-woven crime plot and an interesting focus (Fantasy Book Review)
It's instantly gripping and Paul goes a long way to slowly ease new readers into his strange and wonderful Jackaroo... I already know that "Something Coming Through" will be one of my favourite books of the year. It finds McAuley at the top of his powers - mind-bending, inspiring and very very exciting (Upcoming 4 Me)
Full of exciting plot twists and an intriguing mix of human and non-human chracters, this murder mystery set up in a dystopian is future history at its very best (Starburst Magazine)
Packed with ideas, fantastic world-building and enigmas, and combining elements of first contact, alien artifacts, a touch of dystopia and good old fashioned conspiracy, murder and greed. It's a great combination, all handled with a terrific mix of intelligence and accessibility (For Winter's Nights)
a compelling and realistically imagined piece of speculative fiction anchored be weighty contemporary concerns (The Irish Times)
McAuley writes intelligent hardcore SF, and this should win him countless new readers (The Guardian)
Something Coming Through is science fiction at it's peak, its modern, clever, involving. It's got more ideas than a science fair and more mystery than Miss Marple. Wrap that all up in an original first contact story with some enigmatic aliens, even stranger ancient technology and some great characters and you have one hell of a book (SF Book)
brilliantly splits the difference between James A. Corey's frenetic science fiction and the more considered catastrophes of McAuley's own Quiet War novels. It's fun; it's fascinating; it's fantastic (Tor.com)
Something Coming Through is as tight and relentlessly paced as an Elmore Leonard thriller, and full of McAuley's customary sharp eye for dialogue and action. What's really impressive, though, is that it achieves a seamless fusion of the day-after-tomorrow SF novel - it's as interested in gritty Earthbound near-futurism as William Gibson or Lauren Beukes - with the cosmological themes of McAuley's galaxy-spanning space operas. It's the freshest take on first contact and interstellar exploration in many years, and almost feels like the seed for an entire new subgenre (Alistair Reynolds) -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: paperback.
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Produktinformation
- ASIN : B00MNGZXHE
- Herausgeber : Gollancz; Reprint Edition (19. Februar 2015)
- Sprache : Englisch
- Dateigröße : 2096 KB
- Text-to-Speech (Vorlesemodus) : Aktiviert
- Screenreader : Unterstützt
- Verbesserter Schriftsatz : Aktiviert
- X-Ray : Aktiviert
- Word Wise : Aktiviert
- Haftnotizen : Auf Kindle Scribe
- Seitenzahl der Print-Ausgabe : 385 Seiten
- Amazon Bestseller-Rang: Nr. 303,192 in Kindle-Shop (Siehe Top 100 in Kindle-Shop)
- Nr. 553 in High-Tech Science Fiction (englischsprachig)
- Nr. 2,447 in Science Fiction Abenteuer (englischsprachig)
- Nr. 3,921 in Literarische Belletristik (englischsprachig)
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Die Story beginnt mit Chloe Millar, die im Auftrag ihrer Firma die Auswirkungen der Jackaroo-Ankunft dreizehn Jahre zuvor auf die Menschen untersucht. Dabei trifft sie auf ein Geschwisterpaar, das offenbar etwas zu verbergen hat und plötzlich verschwindet. Als kurz darauf eine Spezialeinheit für außerirdische Technologien Chloes Firma dicht macht und ein Jackaroo-Avatar angegriffen wird, beginnt ein Wettlauf mit ungeahnten Folgen. Nahezu zeitgleich wird auf Mangala, einer der 15 neuen Welten, ein Mord mit einer ungewöhnlichen Waffe verübt und Inspektor Vic Gayle sieht sich mit der rivalisierenden lokalen Unterwelt konfrontiert. Die beiden Handlungen beginnen allmählich, sich zu verdichten..
"Something coming through" ist erfrischend zeitgenössische Sci-Fi-Literatur: Spannend, schnell, unterhaltsam, gespickt mit Ordinärem (man verwendet noch immer Tablets, ferngesteuerte Drohnen, Wikis und 3D-Drucker) und Spektakulärem (fremde Welten und Wesen, synthetische Alien-Drogen, q-Phones, außerirdische Artefakte). Es finden sich viele unterhaltsame popkulturelle Referenzen, die Charaktere sind sympathisch und mit ausreichender Tiefe (was ja nicht unbedingt eine generelle Sci-Fi-Stärke ist), die Sprache ist flüssig und modern, und die Story reich an cleveren Twists, opulentem Setting und reichlich Mystery: Wer sind die Jackaroo? Was wollen sie wirklich? Was ist mit den früheren "Elder Cultures" passiert? Und was will "Ugly Chicken"?
Das Buch ist sicher kein literarisches Jahrhundertwerk, aber eine gute Mischung aus Old-School-Detektivroman, Verschwörungsthriller und Action-Adventure, in das man mitten hineingeworfen wird und das trotzdem leicht zugänglich ist. Man kann das größere erzählerische Universum förmlich spüren, was Lust auf weitere Bücher macht. Klare Empfehlung für alle, die im Sci-Fi-Genre mal wieder einen neuen Autoren entdecken wollen!
Spitzenrezensionen aus anderen Ländern
Reflecting on humanity's first contact with the alien Jackaroo, a character in Paul McAuley's latest novel (his twenty-first) observes the following: "A lot of people said that it was a brand new start. A chance to build fifteen different utopias on fifteen different worlds. A chance to redeem ourselves. But after all the fine talk about how we were going to do better, how we were going to realize the true potential of the human race, and so on, what did we get? It turns out that we brought every kind of human foolishness with us, and invented new ways to f*** up." This quote nicely encapsulates the novel's deftness in simultaneously reaching for the sense of wonder inherent in the exploration of new worlds and the stark realities of the human heart revealed by the grittiness of frontier life.
McAuley's novel is comprised of two parallel near-future narratives. In London, lean, young Chloe Millar works for Disruption Theory, a company that attempts to measure the effects of knowing that we're not alone on the human psyche. Following a cult-related lead takes Chloe to Fahad Chauhan, a teen who draws intensely weird pictures of an alien landscape that might just be real. Meanwhile, in the city of Petra on the planet of Mangala, stocky, middle-aged investigator Vic Gayle and his new partner peel back layer after layer of what initially looks like a vengeance-motivated drug crime. The novel's action-packed, mind-expanding climax weaves both strands together and kinetically ties them into a dazzling knot.
At their most basic levels, Chloe's story reads like a fugitive thriller, while Vic's resembles a noir whodunit in a Western setting. But neither is exactly that, and both are buoyed by McAuely's richly imagined and densely rendered future. A bevy of extrapolations like smart drones, planetary storms, nanotechnology and quantum entanglement are layered, coral-like, atop a history of nuclear detonation ("The Spasm"), global warming and alien contact. Fortunately, McAuley's writing -- impressionistic descriptions, well-wrought speech patterns -- shoulders all the conceptual weight with ease. A joy to read.
The mysterious Jackaroo lie at the heart of the novel's compelling future, but they remain tantalizingly out of focus, forever beyond our understanding. They communicate with humans via "golden vaporware" avatars and offer only enigmatic responses to our most basic questions regarding their purpose in visiting us, answers like "We hope that you will discover your better natures" and "Each client finds its own path." And they are not the novel's only aliens; enter the !Cha, who travel in durable mobile aquaria and may be the Jackaroo's servants, hitchhikers, clients, or secret masters. Oh, and plenty of ruins dating billions of years from some of the Jackaroo's former associates.
At one point in the novel an inspector working for the Met's Alien Technology Investigation Squad says, "The trouble with this Elder Culture stuff is that we don't know what any of it really does. It's completely outside our experience. We're like a bunch of toddlers hitting an atom bomb with hammers." Time and again, in the course of a long, fecund career that includes epic space operas and hyperreal near-future thrillers, McAuley (whom I was fortunate enough to interview recently) has grappled with the question of how far human comprehension -- and evolution -- can reach, and what happens when that reach is exceeded. Something Coming Through, wrapped around dual stories that are only superficially pedestrian, offers intriguing answers while asking riveting new questions.
Having written that, this story is likely the softest science fiction he's written. Typically, he stays away from violations of the laws of nature, such as FTL space travel. However, I've read and liked a lot of stories that more egregiously abused nature.
One issue I have with this story, its that I feel that the author's imagination faltered over the effects of the alien technology on human society, given the years after the aliens appeared. For example, I think that the discovered alien nanotech by itself would have morphed human society out of recognition. As it was, humanity was shown to be trundling along not too differently than it is today. I think the world building would have been more credible, if the story was set shortly after the aliens arrival and not more than a decade later.
My final complaint is with the split nature of the story. McAuley was too successful in his world building. I think there was ample enough material to write a novel from a single point of view. That is, Chloe on earth or Vic on Mangala. I liked both characters. (Although I liked Chloe more.) I always wanted to read more about Chloe's Earth. Likewise, I wanted to read more about Vic's Mangala. That the story was split between the two detracted from the other, even though in the end they were tied together.
In summary, if you're a fan of McAuley and science fiction/police procedural cross-overs you'll like this novel. If you're looking for more of [book:The Quiet War|1375179], you're going to be disappointed. This story is more low-brow than that one.
The next book in the series <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25983898-into-everywhere"> Into Everywhere</a> is published in March, 2016.
The ending wraps things up while leaving threads to continue in the sequel, but - without going in to spoiler territory - the final action sequence seemed to slide past without much in the way of concrete description. I suspect this was a conscious decision to reflect the viewpoints of the two characters (there's no omniscient narrator to quote future encyclopedias at you here, and each character has only limited knowledge of what's going on) but it leaves interesting questions unresolved for subsequent stories about the Jackaroo. I did feel that some important things had occurred offstage and perhaps a third perspective would have revealed more.
This shouldn't put you off reading the book, though - I can genuinely say that I couldn't stop reading until I got to the end, at one o'clock this morning. I can't wait for "Into Everwhere", the next book in the series!
In any event, this book asks the inevitable questions about technologically superior aliens: Will they save us, or will they destroy us? Will they save us by trying to destroy us, or destroy us by trying to save us? Will we turn over a new leaf in our relations to the aliens and to ourselves, or will we just keep repeating old patterns? Can we know the alien, or are our brains not prepared for that? And so on.
Bottom line: You will enjoy this book more if you've already read some of McAuley's Jackaroo stories, but that's not necessary. You just have to know that there are no other Jackaroo novels, and other readers know almost as little as you about the Jackaroo and the planets they gave to humanity. It's not a bad book, but it was too much of a police procedural for my taste. The alien artifacts play an important role, but not to the extent that they do, say, in some of Neal Asher's "Polity" books and stories. There is something coming through, but it will be a while before anyone knows precisely what it is. Recommended.
However, 'Something Coming Through' I enjoyed far more. Again, though, it is not without its weaknesses: Under-developed/explored bad guys with a tendency to look like they've just taken a sneering class at central casting, one or two obvious character trajectories and the sort of protagonist with a tendency to getting themselves into trouble, through an utter lack of basic guile and ability to see beyond their obsessions which simultaneously annoys me as a reader, but does a great job of moving plot forward. All of these things niggled as I was reading the novel, but none of them were deal-breakers and again, the world of 'Something Coming Through' is compelling and believable with lots of deft touches and seemingly throw-away details that, in fact, make it a rich piece of story-telling. I shan't expand on the plot beyond any blurb provided by Amazon/the publishers, except to say that the universe of the Jackaroo has featured in other writings of McAuley's (including a great standalone short story you can buy for pennies for your kindle). 'Mysterious alien benefactors' has been done more times than I can count, but McAuley executes the idea with much originality and skill. I look forward to learning much more about the Jackaroo and their motives in future books.





