First Light from the Imbrium: Fifteen Stories of a World That Forgets (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798180327888)

The Imbrium is a world built on thinning substrate. Two thousand years ago a cataclysm called the Sundering ended the long civilization that preceded the modern era. What it left behind is a continent where memory is geological - where the ground beneath certain stretches of country forgets the people who walked across it, where records left in the wrong archive bleach into illegibility, where whole cities are missing from the maps that used to show them.

The institutions that have grown up in the long aftermath do their work patiently: the Calibration, which measures every adult across twenty named Aspects; the Brindl Order, which trains the Calibrators and keeps the certificates; the Reach Alliance Survey Service, with its five thousand patient mapmakers; the Slow Council of the Stoneborn, who think in centuries. The people inside those institutions are ordinary - clerks, cartographers, smugglers, lighthouse-keepers, bankers, apprentices - and their stories are the stories of a world figuring out, quietly, what is actually being measured.

• A young woman walks to her Calibration on a morning she will remember for the rest of her life.
• A senior census-taker, on his nineteenth annual round, notices for the first time the addresses that are not there.
• Two lovers carry on a thirty-eight-month correspondence across an institutional border neither of them can cross.
• A banker holds a loan application in her hands and decides what kind of person she is.
• A smuggler runs medical supplies into a quarter the maps refuse to name.
• A surveyor on the far western coast meets a people whose perception does not contain the framework the rest of the world is built on - and discovers, with the careful courtesy that the work demands, that her own framework is not what she thought it was.
• And on the last day of the old civilization, six people at six points across a continent that is about to end keep working, because the work is what they have, and because no one yet knows what is coming.

• Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters and Changing Planes
• Ted Chiang's Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others
• Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu
• Kij Johnson's At the Mouth of the River of Bees
• Patient, world-built short fiction that takes its institutions seriously

First Light from the Imbrium is the inaugural short-story collection set in this world - fifteen views of a continent whose ground forgets, sequenced for a reader meeting the place for the first time. Each story is fully self-contained. A brief glossary at the back of the book maps the institutions, species, and dates that recur across the volume, for readers who want to follow the threads.

This is a companion volume to the novella The Cartographer's Daughter and the novel The First Player. New readers can start anywhere.

71,000 words. Approximately four evenings of reading.

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