Century Rain

Century Rain cover

Century Rain is a 2004 noir science fiction alternate history mystery novel by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds (ISBN 0-575-07436-1).

Plot summary

As Century Rain opens, private detectives Wendell Floyd, an expatriate American living in 1950s Paris, and André Custine, his partner, are hired by a concerned landlord to investigate the death of one of his tenants. When they're not detecting, they're jazz musicians, but the music business has drained away because Floyd's ex, Greta, has left Paris to pursue a career with a better band. Blanchard the landlord is certain that the death of Susan White, which the Parisian police have written off as an accident, is murder. Floyd is not so certain, but he's willing to investigate.

In a scene seemingly from another novel, Verity Auger finds herself responsible when her archaeology dig beneath the frozen ruins of some far-flung future Paris goes terribly wrong. The victim of political infighting, she's going to be hung out to dry for all the wrong reasons.

But when she is summoned on a mission to Mars by the top-secret security agency Contingencies, Auger is more than relieved to be exempt from her tribunal and the years of prison that she would otherwise have to face. However, when she is taken to a secret underground base on the Martian moon Phobos containing an ancient alien relic that opens a portal to a distant part of the galaxy, and told that she is to go through it, she begins to have second thoughts about continuing with her mission. Things get even more bizarre when she finds out that at the other end of the portal is an alternate-history version of Earth in the year 1959 - almost 300 years behind the present time - and that she is to retrieve a tin of documents that was left behind by Susan White, an earlier agent sent to "Earth Two", who died under mysterious circumstances.

History and politics

In the mid-2070s, weather control nanomachines were released into Earth's atmosphere and oceans in an attempt to reverse global warming. In late 2076, some of these machines became sentient and stopped obeying orders. In response, more intelligent machines were released in an attempt to control them. By July 2077, a total of eight layers of machines had been released, but the weather continued to get worse. At this point the nanomachines started eating everything in the sea to fuel themselves. They then moved to land, and on July 27th, digested humanity. The only people to survive were those in space habitats. To add insult to injury, fifty years after the Nanocaust all linked digital archives were corrupted, although it is not known whether this was sabotage or an accident.

As a result of the Nanocaust and the Forgetting, humans split into two groups, the Threshers and the Slashers. Threshers believe that it should never be able to happen again, and reject the nanotechnology that led to the nanocaust, preferring to stay on the threshold of dangerous technology, hence their name. The Slashers do not believe they should be limited by what happened in the past and embrace new technology. Their official name is the Federation of the Polities, but they trace their existence back to "an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the first computer networks", whose symbol was a slash and a dot, ie Slashdot.

The Threshers control Earth (or what remains of it), the orbiting structure around it known as Tanglewood and Mars, after a hard-fought war against the Slashers. The Slashers control the rest of the known universe, including an ancient portal network that spans the galaxy.

Trivia

The novel contains several near-quotes from the classic movie Casablanca; this is strange, because Casablanca would never have been made on Earth Two as the Second world War on which it is based never happened there. It is not clear whether this is a deliberate incongruity or merely an oversight.