Fortress Sol by Stephen Baxter

Well, I’ll say one thing about Fortress Sol — it’s not lacking in ambition.

In the 22nd century, a strange energy-based swarm consumes Neptune, and fearing this is a precursor to an alien attack, the human race takes a number of bizarre steps to defend itself, and ensure its survival if it can’t.

Fortress Sol

A generation starship is launched in a century-long journey to colonise a distant star system. …

… And much closer to home, an ambitious millennia-long project begins, to hide the solar system from the as-yet-unseen invaders.

A thousand years later, the Lightbird returns to the Sol system to see what has become of Earth. The crew finds that humanity has masked the entire solar system in a shroud, wrapped the Sun in a Dyson sphere, and is now travelling around the hidden solar system on a planet-spanning rail network!

As I said: ambitious!

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Recursion by Blake Crouch

Blake Crouch is a master of churning out the kind of speculative fiction that actually makes you … well … speculate. The last one I read (Upgrade) was about a man genetically altered by his mad scientist mom. This one reminded me of Dark Matter, which I watched on Apple TV a few months ago, and it had very much the same feel: a scientist working on a cure for Alzheimer’s discovers that the machine she’s working on to access lost memories can actually send people back in time to relive those memories again, and thus change the present (or their future, if you will).

I know! Weird, right‽ The idea is something that I’ve read about before: a school of thinking that posits time is not linear; we only perceive it that way because our fragile three-dimensional thinking would be unable to cope with the reality of everything, everywhere, happening in the same instant. Imagine knowing that you were born, lived , and died (along with the entire universe) at exactly the same moment. And in that case moving to a different point in time “linear” time is as simple as crossing the street.

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