“A hard science fiction writer through and through—and one of the very best alive.” —The Globe and Mail
For millennia, strange lifeforms have emerged from the wormholes after a build and hunted the Eriophora. When a hunter shows up on a derelict ship, the last thing the ship’s crew needs is an AI deciding who—or what—is human. Peter Watts delivers a taut, new science fiction thriller that puts humanity face to face with what comes next.
The last thing the ship’s crew needs is an AI deciding who—or what—is human. Peter Watts (The Freeze Frame Revolution) delivers a taut, new science fiction thriller that puts humanity face to face with what comes next.
It’s been more than sixty-five million years since the Eriophora has encountered another ship from Earth.
Eriophora is one of a handful of converted asteroids building jump gates for a glorious human diaspora that never materialized. The crew pass their lives in stasis, waking for a few precious
moments every millennium or two when Chimp, the ship’s AI, encounters
a problem it can’t handle on its own.
After thwarting a mutiny against Chimp, Viktor Heinwald wakes to find the fellow wormhole-builder Araneus right in their path, derelict and impossibly off-course. Even more impossibly, there’s a monstrous survivor.
For millennia, strange lifeforms have emerged from the wormholes after a build and hunted the Eriophora. Now,
one those hunters has finally caught up, and convinced the Chimp it’s human.
There’s a gremlin on board.
Praise for the work of Peter Watts
“A new book from crazy genius Watts is always cause for celebration . . . Watts is one of those writers who gets into your brain and remains lodged there like an angry, sentient tumor.”
—io9
“[Watts] asks the questions that the best science fiction writers ask, but that the rest of us may be afraid to answer.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Watts displays a gleefully macabre inventiveness combined with scientific rigour.”
—Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl in the Ring
“Peter Watts is some precisely engineered hybrid of Lucius Shepard and Gregory Benford, lyrical yet hard-edged, purveyor of sleek surfaces and also the ethical and spiritual contents inside.”
—Locus
“Watts continues to challenge readers with his imaginative plots and superb storytelling.”
—Library Journal
“[Watts] is a hard science fiction writer through and through—and one of the very best alive, a peer of writers such as Neil Stephenson, Allen Steele, and the Three Gregs, Benford, Bear and Egan.”
—The Globe and Mail
“If science fiction can really be claimed as a literature of ideas, then Watts is without doubt its premier practitioner.”
—Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon
“Even when Watts is wrong he is brilliant.”
—Armed and Dangerous
“Watts’s novels blow the mind pretty much on every page.”
—Tor.com
“Watts’s dark, suspenseful, nightmarish vision of intelligent life in a hostile universe is remorseless in its outlook and unflinching in its conclusions.”
—SF Site
“If science fiction sometimes succumbs to happy myths to make things easier for the reader, Watts has no patience for that crap.”
—Challenging Destiny
Peter Watts (www.rifters.com) is a former marine biologist who clings to some shred of scientific rigor by appending technical bibliographies onto his novels. His debut novel, Starfish, was a New York Times Notable Book, while his fourth, Blindsight—a rumination on the utility of consciousness that has become a required text in undergraduate courses ranging from philosophy to neuroscience—was a finalist for numerous North American genre awards, winning exactly none of them. (It did, however, win a shitload of awards overseas, which suggests that his translators may be better writers than he is.) His novella, The Freeze-Frame Revolution, won the Nowa Fantastyka Prize for Best Foreign Book in Poland.
Watts’s shorter work has also picked up trophies in a variety of jurisdictions, notably a Shirley Jackson Award (possibly due to fan sympathy over his nearly dying of flesh-eating disease in 2011) and a Hugo Award (possibly due to fan outrage over an altercation with US border guards in 2009). The latter incident resulted in Watts being barred from entering the US—not getting on the ground fast enough after being punched in the face by border guards is a “felony” under Michigan statutes—but he can’t honestly say he misses the place all that much. His essays have been collected in Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor, and his short fiction has been collected in Beyond the Rift (2014) and Fold Catastrophes (2026).
Watts’s work is available in twenty-five languages—he seems to be especially popular in countries with a history of Soviet occupation—and has been cited as inspirational to several popular video games. He and his cat, Banana (since deceased), have both appeared in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. A few years ago, he briefly returned to science with a postdoc in molecular genetics, but he really sucked at it. He lives in Toronto.
“Chimp—” Heinwald yelled, too late.
And something kicked Eriophora hard in the side.
***
Now: led down the passageway by a floating machine with guns for arms. A puppet run by the ship’s AI, the hand of the Chimp. Two already dead behind them, cauterized holes burned through their heads.
“There’s little time to argue,” Chimp had said, almost apologetically, after the laser popped Ghora’s eye in its socket. “Please follow the bot.”
Heinwald stumbled along with the others. It’s not murder.It’s optimization. They were costing us time.
Chimp’s trying to save us . . .
Not quite sure what they were being saved from, mind you. Lian Wei’s insane mutiny had been thwarted, the sabotage undone, but systems were still crashing and burning all over the asteroid. Heinwald could see it spread across his BUD. He couldn’t not see it; the innerface spread the carnage across the inside of his eyes even when he squeezed them shut. Forests incinerated in an instant. One of the crypts winking offline: thousands of souls, disconnected if not dead in their coffins. The BUD turned everything into icons and numbers, clean and precise and bloodless. Heinwald’s imagination provided the flames.
Collision Alert flashed in his head a moment before the world trembled. He sacc’d the innerface for an outside view: constellations of shredded metal, sparking in the void. A great silver torus in a rolling sky, torn, twisted, falling into eclipse behind Eri’s jagged horizon. A magic portal built to span the light-years: only debris, now. Nemesis rose into view as the stars wheeled, twenty-five solar masses jammed into a horizon less than two hundred kilometers across, waiting to swallow them whole.
“Stop here,” Chimp said calmly. “Stop and wait.” Crypt 2A flickered and went out. Only four kilometers away. An auxiliary trunk line went dark a moment later.
That’s a line, Heinwald realized. The crashes, the meltdowns, were occurring along a trajectory. That’s an arc . . .
He saw it then: Eriophora dying in strips, something looping through basalt and olivine as though it were vacuum, orbiting the life-giving black hole at Eri’s core and laying waste to everything in its path.
The other singularity. The newborn. So much smaller than the one that powered the asteroid but so much more temperamental. It was supposed to be floating down in the Uterus, safely contained, until called up to boot whatever gate was next in line for ignition. Probably the one they just hit.
Somehow it was loose. Somehow it was swinging around Eriophora’s heart like a ballroom dancer while the ballroom itself―all two hundred thousand cubic kilometers of it―staggered ever closer to Nemesis.
Gremlin
Peter Watts
“A hard science fiction writer through and through—and one of the very best alive.”
—The Globe and Mail
For millennia, strange lifeforms have emerged from the wormholes after a build and hunted the Eriophora. When a hunter shows up on a derelict ship, the last thing the ship’s crew needs is an AI deciding who—or what—is human. Peter Watts delivers a taut, new science fiction thriller that puts humanity face to face with what comes next.
Gremlin
by Peter Watts
ISBN: 9781616964771 (pb); 9781616964788 (eb)
Published: June 15, 2027
Available Format(s): trade paperback; digital
The last thing the ship’s crew needs is an AI deciding who—or what—is human. Peter Watts (The Freeze Frame Revolution) delivers a taut, new science fiction thriller that puts humanity face to face with what comes next.
It’s been more than sixty-five million years since the Eriophora has encountered another ship from Earth.
Eriophora is one of a handful of converted asteroids building jump gates for a glorious human diaspora that never materialized. The crew pass their lives in stasis, waking for a few precious
moments every millennium or two when Chimp, the ship’s AI, encounters
a problem it can’t handle on its own.
After thwarting a mutiny against Chimp, Viktor Heinwald wakes to find the fellow wormhole-builder Araneus right in their path, derelict and impossibly off-course. Even more impossibly, there’s a monstrous survivor.
For millennia, strange lifeforms have emerged from the wormholes after a build and hunted the Eriophora. Now,
one those hunters has finally caught up, and convinced the Chimp it’s human.
There’s a gremlin on board.
Praise for the work of Peter Watts
“A new book from crazy genius Watts is always cause for celebration . . . Watts is one of those writers who gets into your brain and remains lodged there like an angry, sentient tumor.”
—io9
“[Watts] asks the questions that the best science fiction writers ask, but that the rest of us may be afraid to answer.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Watts displays a gleefully macabre inventiveness combined with scientific rigour.”
—Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl in the Ring
“Peter Watts is some precisely engineered hybrid of Lucius Shepard and Gregory Benford, lyrical yet hard-edged, purveyor of sleek surfaces and also the ethical and spiritual contents inside.”
—Locus
“Watts continues to challenge readers with his imaginative plots and superb storytelling.”
—Library Journal
“[Watts] is a hard science fiction writer through and through—and one of the very best alive, a peer of writers such as Neil Stephenson, Allen Steele, and the Three Gregs, Benford, Bear and Egan.”
—The Globe and Mail
“If science fiction can really be claimed as a literature of ideas, then Watts is without doubt its premier practitioner.”
—Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon
“Even when Watts is wrong he is brilliant.”
—Armed and Dangerous
“Watts’s novels blow the mind pretty much on every page.”
—Tor.com
“Watts’s dark, suspenseful, nightmarish vision of intelligent life in a hostile universe is remorseless in its outlook and unflinching in its conclusions.”
—SF Site
“If science fiction sometimes succumbs to happy myths to make things easier for the reader, Watts has no patience for that crap.”
—Challenging Destiny
Peter Watts (www.rifters.com) is a former marine biologist who clings to some shred of scientific rigor by appending technical bibliographies onto his novels. His debut novel, Starfish, was a New York Times Notable Book, while his fourth, Blindsight—a rumination on the utility of consciousness that has become a required text in undergraduate courses ranging from philosophy to neuroscience—was a finalist for numerous North American genre awards, winning exactly none of them. (It did, however, win a shitload of awards overseas, which suggests that his translators may be better writers than he is.) His novella, The Freeze-Frame Revolution, won the Nowa Fantastyka Prize for Best Foreign Book in Poland.
Watts’s shorter work has also picked up trophies in a variety of jurisdictions, notably a Shirley Jackson Award (possibly due to fan sympathy over his nearly dying of flesh-eating disease in 2011) and a Hugo Award (possibly due to fan outrage over an altercation with US border guards in 2009). The latter incident resulted in Watts being barred from entering the US—not getting on the ground fast enough after being punched in the face by border guards is a “felony” under Michigan statutes—but he can’t honestly say he misses the place all that much. His essays have been collected in Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor, and his short fiction has been collected in Beyond the Rift (2014) and Fold Catastrophes (2026).
Watts’s work is available in twenty-five languages—he seems to be especially popular in countries with a history of Soviet occupation—and has been cited as inspirational to several popular video games. He and his cat, Banana (since deceased), have both appeared in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. A few years ago, he briefly returned to science with a postdoc in molecular genetics, but he really sucked at it. He lives in Toronto.
“Chimp—” Heinwald yelled, too late.
And something kicked Eriophora hard in the side.
***
Now: led down the passageway by a floating machine with guns for arms. A puppet run by the ship’s AI, the hand of the Chimp. Two already dead behind them, cauterized holes burned through their heads.
“There’s little time to argue,” Chimp had said, almost apologetically, after the laser popped Ghora’s eye in its socket. “Please follow the bot.”
Heinwald stumbled along with the others. It’s not murder. It’s optimization. They were costing us time.
Chimp’s trying to save us . . .
Not quite sure what they were being saved from, mind you. Lian Wei’s insane mutiny had been thwarted, the sabotage undone, but systems were still crashing and burning all over the asteroid. Heinwald could see it spread across his BUD. He couldn’t not see it; the innerface spread the carnage across the inside of his eyes even when he squeezed them shut. Forests incinerated in an instant. One of the crypts winking offline: thousands of souls, disconnected if not dead in their coffins. The BUD turned everything into icons and numbers, clean and precise and bloodless. Heinwald’s imagination provided the flames.
Collision Alert flashed in his head a moment before the world trembled. He sacc’d the innerface for an outside view: constellations of shredded metal, sparking in the void. A great silver torus in a rolling sky, torn, twisted, falling into eclipse behind Eri’s jagged horizon. A magic portal built to span the light-years: only debris, now. Nemesis rose into view as the stars wheeled, twenty-five solar masses jammed into a horizon less than two hundred kilometers across, waiting to swallow them whole.
“Stop here,” Chimp said calmly. “Stop and wait.” Crypt 2A flickered and went out. Only four kilometers away. An auxiliary trunk line went dark a moment later.
That’s a line, Heinwald realized. The crashes, the meltdowns, were occurring along a trajectory. That’s an arc . . .
He saw it then: Eriophora dying in strips, something looping through basalt and olivine as though it were vacuum, orbiting the life-giving black hole at Eri’s core and laying waste to everything in its path.
The other singularity. The newborn. So much smaller than the one that powered the asteroid but so much more temperamental. It was supposed to be floating down in the Uterus, safely contained, until called up to boot whatever gate was next in line for ignition. Probably the one they just hit.
Somehow it was loose. Somehow it was swinging around Eriophora’s heart like a ballroom dancer while the ballroom itself―all two hundred thousand cubic kilometers of it―staggered ever closer to Nemesis.
“Move now,” saith the Chimp.
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