BOOK EXCEPRT: Lightning Days ~ SF, Finalist for the USA Book News Awards

Dear All,

Here's a little taste of what the prestigious SF magazine Interzone were talking about:

7 Years Before Present Day

"So many alternate Earths," Bel waved at the swarm, row upon row, rank upon myriad rank of marble-sized blue and green worlds hanging in mid-air in the middle of the lounge, swirling languidly round a fixed invisible core above the leather couch.
What are these? Cassidy wondered. Holograms?

Looking through Bel's eyes, he thought that the dark wood cabinets and bookcases around the room could have come from any room in the last three hundred years on Earth. My Earth, he corrected himself. So could the rugs and throws scattered about the open lounge. Their very familiarity was actually part of their strangeness. Bel resumed, "What was first the Centurium, then the Millennium, and as the numbers of alternates grew, became eventually the Multiplicium."

Fascinated by the word, Cassidy broke it down into its component syllables, rolling it round in his mind. He tried to get Bel to say the word again, without success. As his efforts overrode the crystal-viewer's normal restraints on its user, he thought he glimpsed Sophia talking to stupefied soldiers in American uniforms. The vision passed, as abruptly as it had come.

Cassidy flashed a mental apology to his host, who seemed to be, from her voice and clothes, an adolescent girl. She no more noticed his apology than his television at home would have, instead saying, "As they were all variations of one world, we couldn't call each world Earth, or New Earth, or even New New Earth."
Bel's parents chuckled dutifully, and Bel bobbed her head. "So we number them, in order."
"And our world is?" Kazan sat, a gray grizzled monolith, in one of the chairs. Form fitting, leather covered, the chairs molded their shapes around their occupants. They had been moved to one side to give the feeling of an auditorium. Kazan obviously felt he should contribute something, rather than sitting there like a trophy on the wall.
Kazan was hairier than the Thals in previous crystals, Cassidy noted. Then he realized that Kazan hadn't just shaved his body hair. The hair that was shaved was patterned into swirls, whorls and curlicues, as complex as any tattoo.

Bel frowned her disapproval at his interruption, "Sixty-eight twenty, Dad!"

Lightning Days has been reviewed in Interzone, who said of it:

"Imagine Raymond Baxter's Riftwars crossed with Stephen Baxter's love of vast timescales and you're starting to appreciate the story in Colin Harvey's Lightning Days. Harvey has cherry-picked morsels of genre and carefully blended them together - we experience different planes of reality; travelling between them is achieved via ritual; and there's espionage, romance and outright adventure.

You will find good ideas aplenty in Lightning Days."

Cheers

Colin Harvey

Novels from Swimming Kangaroo Books:
Lightning Days -- SF, Finalist for the USA Book News Awards
The Silk Palace -- An epic fantasy, out 23 September 07

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