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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Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton

This is the sequel to Mickey7 which I read earlier this year, but this time, I showed enough restraint to read a couple of other books before attempting it. If I really enjoy a book, I sometimes dive straight into the follow-up, and that usually doesn’t end well.

Not this time, and I’d like to think that’s perhaps one reason why I enjoyed Antimatter Blues even more than the first book.

Antimatter Blues
Antimatter Blues

Set a few years after the colonists’ arrival on Niflheim, Mickey’s life has settled into what could laughingly described as normalcy: he’s resigned his position as the colony’s expendable – meaning he no longer has to sacrifice himself by fixing the antimatter reactor or carrying bombs into the lair of the indigenous insectoid population; he’s settled into a long-term relationship with a pilot; and he’s managed to land a part-time role cleaning out the rabbit pens (aside from dying when ordered to, Mickey isn’t really qualified to do anything else). But then he starts to notice something rather odd: he occasionally spots other copies of him near the antimatter reaction chamber. It appears that new versions of him are being run off, and whoever is making them isn’t even polite enough to wait for him to die first. …

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