Humanity has taken to the stars, using faster than light travel to reach distant planets and new worlds. But in the far reaches of the galaxy, John Grant will discover a planet of humans who believe he has travelled not only through space to find them, but time. On Apis, the mysterious Fermi appear to have vanished, taking with them knowledge of the universe that humanity desires. But Marcus Owen, the robot AI now plagued with sentience, knows that the Fermi would not easily abandon the native life of Apis, and that they won't take kindly to mankind asserting dominance on a world that does not belong to them.

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Ken Macleod
Ken MacLeod (born 2 August 1954), an award-winning Scottish science fiction writer, lives in South Queensferry near Edinburgh. MacLeod graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics.[1] His novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism. Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection. MacLeod's general outlook can be best described as techno-utopian socialist,[2][3] though unlike a majority of techno-utopians, he has expressed great scepticism over the possibility and especially over the desirability of Strong AI. He is known for his constant in-joking and punning on the intersection between socialist ideologies and computer programming, as well as other fields. For example, his chapter titles such as "Trusted Third Parties" or "Revolutionary Platform" usually have double (or multiple) meanings. A future programmers union is called "International Workers of the World Wide Web", or the Webblies, a reference to the Industrial Workers of the World, who are nicknamed the Wobblies. There are also many references to, or puns on, zoology and palaeontology. For example in The Stone Canal the title of the book, and many places described in it, are named after anatomical features of marine invertebrates such as starfish. He is part of a new generation of British science fiction writers, who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Stephen Baxter, Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross, Richard Morgan and Liz Williams.