I Read Books: 400 Billion Stars
Paul J MCauley’s debut novel, now thirty years old. Despite being more than 500 years in the future there’s a few things in the backstory that are a bit odd (the fall of the Soviet Union was about to rip apart a lot future histories) but it gets away with it because the whole thing was a bit odd even at the time.
Dorthy Yoshida is a telepath and has been conscripted into the navy. They’re fighting a mysterious and hostile alien force in one star system and have discovered ambiguous traces in another. They need her to find out what’s going on.
She succeeds and it’s bleak; the 400 Billion Stars of the Milky Way referred to in the title do not give a damn about what’s going on in the handful that humanity knows about. On a quarantined, indifferently hostile world whose ecosystem is slowly falling apart, what use is the knowledge?
Read This: For a glorious if gloomy science fiction novel with a generous seasoning of clever ideas and gorgeous writing.
Don’t Read This: If you want your secret history of the universe to be optimistic
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