Smoke

A searing near-future tale about love, loss and loneliness in an incomprehensible world. Humanity has been split into three different species. Mutual incomprehension has fractured the globe. As humans race to be the first of their kind to reach the stars, another Great War looms.For you, that means returning to Yorkshire and the town of your birth, where factories churn out the parts for gigantic spaceships. You're done with the pretensions of the capital and its unfathomable architecture. You're done with the people of the Bund, their easy superiority and unstoppable spread throughout the city of London and beyond. You're done with Georgy Chernoy and his questionable defeat of death. You're done with his daughter, Fel, and losing all the time. You're done with love.But soon enough you will find yourself in the Smoke again, drawn back to the life you thought you'd left behind. You're done with love. But love's not done with you.

"a wonderfully imaginative story, the sort of thing Adam Roberts might write, or perhaps Christopher Priest: stories about history that didn’t happen but feels oddly like it did, and characters who are very different from us but at the same time very familiar. For those who don't mind if their alternate worlds are liberally dosed with surrealism, this is likely to be a very special book." - Booklist Starred Review"With varying perspectives and time lines, this complex work takes on mortality and prejudice through the lens of emotional connection. Ings crafts smart alternate history that takes a deep look at belief systems and the judgment of others based on perception. The use of genetic manipulation to create superior and lesser human species speaks to the bias that exists in the real world." - Library Journal“a book of alternate history unlike any you’ve ever encountered” - Barnes & Noble SFF Blog - Best of January“a truly weird, profoundly intelligent science fiction novel that dares to extrapolate a richness of both wonders and horrors from our own modern world...prepare to be dazzled by its sheer inventiveness” - The Frumious Consortium“Ings's character-focused narrative makes this more accessible than a hard sf novel. The ideas that rise to the top are universal: social class distinctions, loneliness, and love” - Kirkus Reviews Best of January“looks like one of the major SF novels of 2019” - Black Gate“[the] prose is very eloquent...[with] the knack of turning a phrase to make it memorable” - Adventures in Poor Taste“One of the brilliant aspects of the science fiction genre is the willingness to take risks...The Smoke by Simon Ings is the pinnacle of this concept” - Fangirl Nation

Simon Ings is the author of eight previous novels (some science fiction, some not) and two works of non-fiction, including the Baillie Gifford longlisted Stalin And The Scientists. His debut novel Hot Head was widely acclaimed. He is the arts editor of New Scientist magazine and splits his time between a sweltering penthouse in Dubai (not his) and possibly the coldest flat in London.