World Engines: Destroyer (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781473223196)

In the year 2570, a sleeper will wake . . .In the mid-21st century, the Kernel, a strange object on a five-hundred-year-orbit, is detected coming from high above the plane of the solar system. Could it be an alien artefact? In the middle of climate-change crises, there is no mood for space-exploration stunts - but Reid Malenfant, elderly, once a shuttle pilot and frustrated would-be asteroid miner, decides to go take a look anyway. Nothing more is heard of him. But his ex-wife, Emma Stoney, sets up a trust fund to search for him the next time the Kernel returns . . .By 2570 Earth is transformed. A mere billion people are supported by advanced technology on a world that is almost indistinguishable from the natural, with recovered forests, oceans, ice caps. It is not an age for expansion; there are only small science bases beyond the Earth. But this is a world you would want to live in: a Star Trek without the stars.After 500 years the Kernel returns, and a descendant of Stoney, who Malenfant will call Emma II, mounts a mission to see what became of Malenfant. She finds him still alive, cryo-preserved . . . His culture-shock encounter with a conservative future is entertaining . . . But the Kernel itself turns out to be attached to a kind of wormhole, through which Malenfant and Emma II, exploring further, plummet back in time, across five billion years . . .

Author: Stephen Baxter
ISBN-10: 1473223199
ISBN-13: 9781473223196
Publisher: Gollancz
Language: English
Published: 08/10/2021
Pages: 576
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.00w x 1.50d

About the Author
Stephen Baxter is the pre-eminent science fiction writer of his generation. Published around the world he has also won major awards in the UK, US, Germany and Japan. Born in 1957 he has degrees from Cambridge and Southampton. He lives in Northumberland with his wife.