Aphelion Publications, 1994
DITMAR AWARD NOMINEE
Sean’s first novel, later rewritten to become the first half of Sean’s highly acclaimed Greatwinter novel, Souls in the Great Machine.
“… a comprehensively imagined future … creations both terrifying and mundane, both bizarre and believeable … His world of Greatwinter is both tangibly present and beautifully imagined.”
“McMullen has made his humans very strange indeed, but it is the strangeness of genuine otherness … the cast inhabit a culture whose profound and shaping experiences are radically different from anything we might easily imagine … will be one of the shapers of our sense of how to keep on living after the orrery splits”
“… squarely and ingeniously science fictional …”
“McMullen has exquisitely crafted a world into which the reader falls into the atmosphere and glides along with the characters …”
“An exotic future Australia of wind-trains, warring federations and human-powered computers.”
“… does not shrink from the difficult task of depicting the complex historical and social evolution of a civilisation as distant from us as we are from the Romans.”
