New Book of the Week: Child of the River

Our New Book of the Week is – in a piece of symmetry so neat, one would almost suspect it of being planned – by our current Author of the Month. It is Child of the River , the first book of Confluence, by the extraordinary Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author, Paul McAuley.

Confluence – a long, narrow man-made world, half fertile river valley, half crater-strewn desert. It is a world at the end of its time, a place of savagery, bureaucracy and war, inhabited by countless flying micro-machines and ten thousand bloodlines ruled by devotion to absent gods.

It is the home of a singular young man named Yama. An infant who was discovered in a bier on the river, he was raised by the prelate of Aeolis until it was learned that his ancestry was unique. Yama appeared to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the worshipped architects of Confluence.

Now, awed and fearful of his increasing ability to awaken the machines the Builders left behind, Yama searches for his identity and a history that is both his and his world’s.

 
Child of the River is the first volume in the acclaimed Confluence trilogy. It is followed by Ancients of Days and Shrine of Stars. The entire Confluence trilogy is also available in an omnibus edition, boasting two additional short stories (trade paperback | eBook).

You can find more of Paul McAuley’s work via his Author page on the SF Gateway website and read about him in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.