Century Rain (2004)

Three hundred years in the future, Verity Auger is a specialist in the archaeological exploration of Earth, rendered uninhabitable after the technological catastrophe known as the Nanocaust. After a field-trip to goes badly wrong, Verity is forced to redeem herself by participating in a dangerous mission, for which her expertise in invaluable. Using a backdoor into an unstable alien transit system, Auger’s faction has discovered something astonishing at the far end of a wormhole: mid twentieth-century Earth, preserved like a fly in amber. Is it a window into the past, a simulation, or something else entirely? CENTURY RAIN is not just a time-travel story, nor a tale of alternate history. Part hard SF thriller, part interstellar adventure, part noir romance, CENTURY RAIN is something altogether stranger.

 

My fifth novel, and a very conscious step away from the Revelation Space universe. I very much wanted to do something different, and hopefully establish that I could be more than a one-trick pony. Century Rain remains one of my personal favorites, and there’s no doubt that it addresses quite a few of my personal obsessions – perhaps more so than the earlier books.

Floyd is totally colour blind, by the way, and we never see a colour from his point of view. In other words, he’s living in his own black and white movie. (Yes, I know that full monochromatic colour blindness is rare…)