It is such a short book that it would be a shame if you go in knowing too much – I advise against reading the Kirkus review or the ones on SFFWorld or Locus. His choice allows him to speed things up, and because of that, tell a more powerful story. None of the man-made stuff of Termination Shock or The Ministry for the Future, but change brought about by Taraxippus – a black hole one-tenth the mass of the sun that passes through our solar system.Įven though the origin of the problem in the story is formally much more in line with Ballard’s classic The Drowned World, it is exactly through the science fictional lens of a cosmic disaster that Egan manages to say a lot about man-made climate change nonetheless. Well – climate change, but not as you know it. That classification does matter, as I’ll explain below. While every online bookstore or professional review I’ve consulted seems to consider this a novel, Egan himself calls it a novella on his own website. Length is another argument to give it a chance: its 214 pages offer a short, smooth, engaging read. While it may have a difficult world in the title, the fact that Tor published it is an indication of its accessibility. With hardly any science inside, this novella shows yet another side of Australia’s most reclusive science fiction author. If you think Greg Egan isn’t to your liking – too dense, too much math, too much science – Perihelion Summer is the title for you.
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