John Meaney's short stories in Interzone magazine gave him a reputation in SF circles for being highly promising. The promise is fulfilled in his debut novel To Hold Infinity, which has all the authentic flash and dazzle of cutting-edge SF. It's set on a colony world whose aristocracy of "Luculenti" are genuinely superior to the common herd, thanks to built-in brain enhancements which provide all-senses net communication and multi- tasking processing power. The implications are nicely explored, with characters manipulating the market and buying/selling companies during fleeting pauses in conversation. An utterly hissable serial-killer villain exploits fellow-Luculenti's permanent Net links to assimilate their minds using vampire software and steal their add-ons for himself—his mind is multiplied by hundreds of these "extra brains", while the legal limit is three. Others sense that something's wrong, and tough heroine Sunadomari Yoshiko from primitive old Earth becomes entangled in the invisible, multi-levelled struggle for people's souls. When the now megalomaniac killer goes too far in public, the hunt is on and Yoshiko will be the bait ... The book glows with biological and nanotechnological wonders, strange weapons and surprising perspectives. It is deservedly shortlisted for the 1999 British SF Association Award. —David Langford

John Meaney received much praise and a British SF Association Award shortlisting for his first novel To Hold Infinity (1998), full of clever new SF ideas and ingenious twists on old ones. Paradox is his second.

The setting is Nulapeiron, a many levelled world of exotic underground cities where the lower classes are literally kept below by a meritocracy of intellectual Lords. Change is forbidden, perhaps impossible: the barely human "Oracles", disconnected from time, provide snapshots from an unalterable, deterministic future. Chaos and uncertainty are dirty words and "I'll be heisenberged" a foul oath.

Young hero Tom—brought up in a deep-down bazaar—loses his mother to an Oracle's whim, his father to a cruelly self-fulfilling prediction, and his arm to the Lords' cruel justice. He's primed with hatred and inspired by a biographical data-crystal given him by an outlawed Pilot who's navigated the now forbidden fractal complexities of mu-space. Tom has enough mathematical genius to storm the pyramid of Nulapeiron's high society and perhaps gain power to take revenge—if he can also solve the paradox of how to kill an Oracle whose death date is fixed, known, and far off in time. Change would become possible...

Meaney's sustained inventiveness continues to dazzle. Paradox may be a little heavy on martial-arts action for some tastes, but the roller-coaster plot is full of unexpected twists, revelations, biotechnological oddities, changes of course and unlikely alliances. Crackling tension continues to the very end. Nice one. —David Langford

Context is a direct sequel to John Meaney's well-received SF novel Paradox, whose hero Tom Corcorigan sparked an impossible revolution in the teeming underground regimes of planet Nulapeiron. What next?

Tom's ingenious, paradoxical insight was how to short-circuit the ruling "Oracles" whose knowledge of unchangeable future facts held Nulapeiron frozen in slavery and stasis. Now it's AD 3418, and after that partly successful revolution, the logic of paradox rebounds on Tom. His lady love dies or seems to die, yet a Seer shows him a future in which he rescues her. His new path is shaped by the need to make this vision possible.

Meanwhile, an unpleasant force called the Dark Fire or Blight is grabbing power in one subterranean community after another. Initiates become non-people who work and fight with eerily perfect synchronisation. "They're part of the Blight, just components, and that means they're no longer human." Following his personal quest through the wonders and dangers of Nulapeiron's exotic deeps, Tom keeps colliding with the machinations of the Blight.

An alternate storyline in the far past, AD 2142, follows the early life of Ro—the first human Pilot to be born adapted for vision and flight in "mu-space". (Her mother Karyn's story formed a similar strand in Paradox.) This is partly a murder mystery featuring multiple assassins, a cryptic dying message, and the intriguing alien Zajinets from Beta Draconis 3 who know more about mu-space than they're letting on. Ro's father, lost in that strange continuum, may have become a kind of god...

Besides violence, battle, torture, martial-arts extravaganzas and nanotechnology, Context is pervaded by webs of mysticism. There seems to be another, more sinister man-made god behind the Dark Fire. A blue fire is central to the mystery of the Oracles—not to mention the Zajinets—and when Tom himself touched by this fire, the effects are awesome.

This is a big, demanding, compelling novel, full of rewarding complexities and alive with that quantum strangeness where hard science intersects with the unknowable. A third Nulapeiron volume is promised: Resolution. —David Langford