by Ken MacLeod
First published 2005
The ancient starship But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! completes its four hundred year voyage to a new star system. Its long-lived crew has spent centuries preparing to colonize what they expect to be another empty world. The younger generation aboard grows eager to begin settlement as the ship enters orbit around the system's Earth-like planet. Then they detect strange electromagnetic emissions from the surface below. The signals force them to confront an unsettling reality about their universe. Meanwhile, on the planet Ground, a young astronomer spots what he believes is a comet. His colleague Orro, a physicist working on flight experiments, calculates the object's trajectory and discovers something deeply troubling about its path. Both the space travelers and the planet dwellers must grapple with the same shocking truth. Their fundamental assumptions about the cosmos have crumbled overnight, forcing them to reexamine everything they thought they knew about their place in the universe.
Genres: science-fiction, space-opera, hard-science-fiction
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: first-contact, found-family, worldbuilding
Setting: Ground, But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!
Period: 400 years
303 pages · Hardcover · Tor Books