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The Tristopolis books

Dark Blood (UK title) Black Blood (US title) sequel to Bone Song

Dark Blood Black Blood

Lieutenant Donal Riordan is no longer the man he was... but to conspirators who threaten the civic order of Tristopolis and the rights of non-human sentients, he is an enemy who needs to be silenced. Even the most powerful of cities can change its character when the circumstances are filled with enough paranoia and fear.

And when the conspiracy's international dimensions become clear, Donal must travel to Illurium, not just to Silvex City, the city that stands on vast glass planes, but further, to places unlike Tristopolis, yet just as strange.

One thing Dark Blood doesn't do is let you relax... In places it's a bloodbath appropriate to the title, and as John Meaney follows his take on magic's equivalent of nuclear technology through to its logical conclusion he creates one of the most satisfying border crossing fusions of Dark Fantasy, Horror and hard Science Fiction in years... before hitting us with a twist ending straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. Anthony Brown, Starburst

John Meaney's city of Tristopolis... is a vivid and fascinating creation, first displayed in Bone Song, now revisited in Dark Blood. The sequel unravels more of the conspiracy revealed in the first book, only now the detective hero is dead - or, rather, undead, having been revived as a zombie - and facing the possibility that new legislation will strip human rights from him and all other undead citizens. Meaney entertainingly merges the police procedural with science fantasy in its most Gothic mode. Lisa Tuttle, Times (London)

Dark Blood is highly entertaining, more action driven and seasoned with splatters of the titular liquid. Andrew Osbourne, SFX

Over the course of two books, Meaney has successfully integrated the tricks of horror with the techniques of crime and SF. The surface of this series is horror, but it is only skin deep. These books have the comfort of rationality. The flesh of Dark Blood is that of a detective novel. This can be difficult to manage convincingly in science fiction, but the hard work of building the universe in the first book is repaid here: we now have a conception of normality within the setting so we can seek clues ourselves and attempt to get ahead of Riordan. As with any good detective novel, flicking back through the pages shows how many clues were there. The bones of the books, meanwhile, confirm a scientifictionally coherent universe within this endeavour. More than the clues for detective readers, I got a great deal of pleasure out of the hints for astronomy fans, of which I will say no more to allow like-minded readers their own enjoyment.

And there is more to come, with plenty of swearing and action too, given the kicker of a cliffhanger on the last page.Duncan Lawie, Strange Horizons

Bone Song

Bone Song Bone Song

Imagine a city named Tristopolis, where tall towers rear beneath a dark, indigo sky, gargoyles glide overhead, while purple cabs drive along the streets. Elevators are powered by boundwraiths. Warmth and power come from reactor piles, deep inside Energy Authority complexes, where the bones of the dead are stacked. Necroflux replays the fragmented memories and feelings of two thousand corpses in each reactor, producing a chaos of mixed identities and suffering that the living would rather not know about.

Tough cop Lieutenant Donal Riordan is assigned to protect a visiting diva, Maria daLivnova, who may be a target for those who collect the bones of great performing artists.

But the dark cult is more powerful and secretive than anyone, even Donal's non-human allies, can suspect. And he has been touched by the bones.

Do you hear the bones?

What the reviewers think:

Brilliantly fuses SF with elements of gothic fantasy. SFX

Fast paced, very entertaining and out of the ordinary... both haunting and engaging. SFFWorld.com

Crisply written and vividly portrayed Guardian

Meaney's creepy death-haunted world lingers in the mind long after the book is closed... a smart and spooky read. The Times

Dark fantasy crossed with mean-streets paranoia... Bone Song... surprises at every turn, particularly a last-minute twist that comes out of nowhere, and a last page twist that overturns your expectations about follow-up volumes. Oh yes, this is the start of a series, and a very welcome start. Starburst

A remarkable book featuring a unique dark fantasy/SF world and great writing. The police procedural plot, creepy technology, and seamless, fascinating world make it a real page-turner, full of great twists and details. Bone Song has really got it all: fantasy, horror, science fiction, cops, crime -- even a love story and a dose of dark, dry humor. A great read and I can't wait for the next one. Kat Richardson, author of Greywalker

John Meaney brings a city of death to richly textured life. In an amazing blend of noir mystery and dark fantasy, Meaney doesn't just build a world -- he creates an eerie culture that you can truly visualize and feel. Bone Song is a thrilling and suspenseful beginning to a great new series. Mark Del Franco, author of Unshapely Things

It's not often that you open a book expecting a good science fiction mystery crossover and find yourself blown away by a world that's so multidimensional and textured that you have to keep looking up from the pages to make sure the sky is blue and the lights are on. The setting was so foreign, alien really, that it's hard to believe just how real it seemed. It seems that greed, power, lust, and cruelty are concepts that bridge the gap between our world and others -- to make the story come alive.

There's many books that tell a compelling story with realistic characters and a satisfactory end. There's many books that we say we couldn't put down. This book is one of those but it's also a story that doesn't let you walk quietly away when you close the book on the last page, because it's going to linger in your thoughts and your dreams -- the ideas, the relationships, and the people are memorable because of who they are and what they are willing to do to make the world a better place. SFRevue.com & GumshoeReview.com

Think Dirty Harry in a city created by the bastard love-child of Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville. The backdrop of a hardboiled crime plot cleverly disguises stories of human interaction, trust, mistrust, loyalty, morality, acceptance and love while delivering a great mystery. NethSpace.com

The Nulapeiron Sequence

Paradox

Paradox

Nulapeiron: a world isolated for twelve centuries, whose ten billion inhabitants live in subterranean strata whose upper levels, dwellings of the aristocratic classes, boast organic technologies and the use of Oracles whose ability to foresee their future is a most useful curse.

Tom Corcorigan is young and impoverished, witness to the death of a mysterious woman who may be one of the legendary Pilots, and soon to be thrust into dreadful suffering, and servitude among the logosophically trained ruling classes. He will prove to be brilliant, though physically and psychologically flawed: poet, revolutionary, and more.

He needs to avenge himself against an Oracle who foresees Tom's failure, to fight a corrupt system and the too-violent revolution that reacts against it, to find himself...

Nulapeiron is a complex world with hundreds of different languages and cultures. The Oracles' abilities derive from genuine speculations about the true nature of time, a mystery at the heart of physics. Above all, the novel is about people, and the complexity of life, and the inevitability of unexpected twists in destiny.

What the reviewers think:

Paradox (and the whole Nulapeiron Sequence) is a glittering jewel in the crown of the new British space opera -- a work that manages the fiendishly difficult trick of combining vivid world-building with hard-science rigor, like a collaboration between Jack Vance and Greg Egan at their creative peaks. I'm awe-struck by Paradox; John Meaney has single-handedly raised the bar for hard SF and space opera. Charles Stross, Hugo Award-winning author

Barnes & Noble chose Paradox as the number 2 SF novel of 2005. John Meaney's cerebral science fiction thriller Paradox is set in a subterranean world where an elite few rule over an oppressed populace. Can one impoverished boy topple the entire system -- and attain revenge -- with nothing but his intellect? Explorations, the Barnes & Noble newsletter

The first installment in a thoughtful, intricate far-future trilogy... fast-moving, distinctive, and sometimes spectacular. Kirkus Reviews

Paradox's ingeniously stratified universe is reminiscent of Dune. Entertainment Weekly

...impressive... intriguing ruminations on the nature of time mesh well with Meaney's fine plotting and his excellent world building. Publishers Weekly

..rich, complex, baroque novel... recognizable from the outset as a unique milestone in the SF field... A landmark work. Science Fiction Weekly/SciFi.com

Context

Context

Tom Corcorigan, former Lord, legendary revolutionary and and would-be peacemaker, poet and logosopher... a flawed hero, in a flawed world. Wounded, his survival depends on a Seer whose space-warping talents are strangely different from those of Oracles... while death strikes close to Tom's heart.

But as society disintegrates once more, there are deeper and stronger forces than anyone can imagine. An insidious enemy whose nature makes humankind obsolete is taking yet another world -- Nulapeiron -- into its vast extended self. Now is the time for legends to be reborn.

What the reviewers think:

Meaney is a wonderful writer who deserves worldwide recognition. Cheryl Morgan, Emerald City

Context is a thrilling, daring and complex novel that confirms John Meaney as one of British science fiction's most original and exciting practitioners. Barnes & Noble

Replete with thought-provoking ruminations on the nature of space and time, Meaney's second Nulapeiron book (after Paradox) follows Tom Corcorigan as the logosopher and one-armed warrior, now a lord, seeks an antidote for the femtocyte toxins that are slowly killing him.... [Readers] should enjoy the exquisite world building of this ambitious SF epic. Publishers Weekly

Science fiction fans looking for the next big genre classic need look no further than the Nulapeiron Sequence, a highly cerebral sci-fi trilogy by British author John Meaney that has been (deservedly) compared to Frank Herbert's epic masterwork Dune. Meaney's Nulapeiron Sequence (Paradox, Context and the forthcoming Resolution) is a landmark work for multiple reasons: unparalleled world building, the world of Nulapeiron is one of the most vividly described and utterly unique realms ever imagined in the history of science fiction; plot density, like Nulapeiron's multi-leveled society, the story of Tom Corcorigan has innumerable layers; dozens of secondary themes and subplots; and above all else, readability: fans of hard science fiction will not be able to put this sweeping and thought-provoking saga down B&N Explorations

What we have here...is two novels [Paradox and Context] of a three novel sequence that attempts to be both literary and thematically quite sophisticated and mimetic, unlike space opera, without being anything more or less than science fiction period, and for my money succeeds....[T]his is science fiction for people who read science fiction. Asimov's Science Fiction

Resolution

Resolution

It is the aftermath of war and invasion. Tom is newly married and wants nothing more than a new, peaceful life. But there is a greater force that has already subsumed billions of human and non-human beings; and now its attention is focused on Nulapeiron.

Tom doesn't just have a wife -- he has a close friend, the bloody disembodied head of a Seer whose influence takes him to a place no one should be able to see. And for two decades, he has owned a Pilot's crystal, whose links across the centuries to the future of his world become apparent: a future dependent on those who live in Labyrinth, a strange, living, fractal city in the mu-space continuum where Pilots live.

Soon, most of Nulapeiron has fallen. Can its salvation rest with one damaged man, no longer truly human, who can fight the Anomaly only by sacrificing everything?

What the reviewers think:

Is it good? Of course it is. Meaney is one of the best authors of hard SF in the world at the moment, and he doesn't put a foot wrong here. SFX

Fascinating and highly detailed... an emotionally and intellectually satisfying finale. Publisher's Weekly

Immensely satisfying... a genuinely impressive trilogy. Starburst

Stunning... a welcome return from one of the UK's premier SF writers, and brings to a close one of the most original series of the past ten years. Books Quarterly

Few characters in hard SF are more impressive... a fitting end to an intelligent and literate SF sequence. Jon Courtenay Grimwood

also in the Pilots future history . . .

To Hold Infinity

To Hold Infinity

Widowed Yukiko leaves Earth for a voyage to the paradise of Fulgor, the world that her son Tetsuo emigrated to, some years before. They have been estranged for such a long time, but Yukiko needs to make sense of her life. When she arrives on Fulgor, though, she finds a murder investigation in full swing, Tetsuo missing, and a society that is too advanced and fast-moving for even a talented scientist to understand and function in.

Tetsuo's life on Fulgor has been hard. No unenhanced person can keep up with the electronically enhanced few who are known as Luculenti, able to create commercial empires in seconds and make plans covering timescales of centuries, and to traverse the virtual richness of Skein. He hadn't expected to deal with the elite; but the better Fulgidi merchants still have superior abilities, driven by the presence of Luculenti. That is why Tetsuo has resorted to illegal activity, making use of his family background and his knowledge of mu-space communications technology. But one of his associates is a far more dangerous person than he could ever suspect.

Luculentus Rafael Garcia de la Vega is a psychopath, able to suck thoughts and memories from the electronically enhanced nervous systems of his fellow Luculenti -- both the living and the dead. He plays a predatory game, stimulated by the danger, growing ever more audacious.

What Yukiko is plunged into is more than a homicide investigation, more than a hunt for her fugitive son. It plays out against a background of government conspiracy and widespread unrest, even on this, the richest of worlds.

What the reviewers think:

John Meaney is a spectacular writer. He makes SF seem all fresh and new again. Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author

Dazzlingly imagined and dazzlingly executed... This is a work of true uniqueness by a true talent. Wow! Connie Willis, Hugo Award-winning author

Dark, complex and glitters with brilliant strangeness... John Meaney has rewired SF. Everything is different now. Stephen Baxter