World Engines

In the year 2570 a sleeper will wake . . . In the mid-21st century the Kernel a strange object on a five-hundred-year-orbit is detected coming from high above the plane of the solar system. Could it be an alien artefact? In the middle of climate-change crises there is no mood for space-exploration stunts - but Reid Malenfant elderly once a shuttle pilot and frustrated would-be asteroid miner decides to go take a look anyway. Nothing more is heard of him. But his ex-wife Emma Stoney sets up a trust fund to search for him the next time the Kernel returns . . . By 2570 Earth is transformed. A mere billion people are supported by advanced technology on a world that is almost indistinguishable from the natural with recovered forests oceans ice caps. It is not an age for expansion; there are only small science bases beyond the Earth. But this is a world you would want to live in: a Star Trek without the stars. After 500 years the Kernel returns and a descendant of Stoney who Malenfant will call Emma II mounts a mission to see what became of Malenfant. She finds him still alive cryo-preserved . . . His culture-shock encounter with a conservative future is entertaining . . . But the Kernel itself turns out to be attached to a kind of wormhole through which Malenfant and Emma II exploring further plummet back in time across five billion years . . .