Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial A future world of unrelenting change, strangeness, and uncertainty, experienced through the passions and memories of one remarkable old woman
Roushana Maitland has known great fame and great sorrow throughout her long life. As a world-renowned musician, she was the queen of the Paris bohemians even as nuclear war raged elsewhere around the globe. She lost a beloved brother in a terrorist-created biological nightmare. She sometimes relished, sometimes endured her marriage to a brilliant and unpredictable conductor. Now, she lives out her days on the rugged Cornish coast, remembering past glories and heartbreaks. She struggles with the decision to let her life slip away, or choose a virtual existence for eternity, as so many of her friends and acquaintances have already done.
Then, one day, she discovers a naked young man who has washed up on the beach. She brings him home, dresses him in her husband’s clothes, and calls him “Adam.” As this strange arrival convalesces, Roushana shares her stories and her secrets, recounting the personal landmarks in a remarkable life lived in a world gone mad, even as his own past remains a mystery.
Ian R. MacLeod (born 1956) is a British science fiction and fantasy writer. He was born in Solihull near Birmingham. He studied law and worked as a civil servant before going freelance in early 1990es soon after he started publishing stories, attracting critical praise and awards nominations. He is the author of the novels The Light Ages and The House of Storms, which are set in an alternate universe nineteenth century England, where aether, a substance that can be controlled by the mind, has ossified English society into guilds and has retarded technological progress. MacLeod's debut novel, The Great Wheel, was published in 1997, and won the Locus Award for Best First novel. MacLeod's novella The Summer Isles (Asimov's Science Fiction Oct/Nov 1998) won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for and the World Fantasy Award. It is an alternate history where Britain, having been defeated in the World War I, develops its own form of fascism in 1930s. The narrator is a closeted homosexual Oxford historian who had known the leader in youth. It was written as a novel, which however could not sell; MacLeod published the cut version, with the full-length version only being published in a limited edition in 2005. This novel version also won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, thus becoming the only story to win the same award twice in two differing formats, novel and novella. MacLeod won the World Fantasy Award again in for his 2000 novelette The Chop Girl. His shorter fiction has been collected in Voyages by Starlight, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations and Past Magic.
