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.”

David A. Smith

New York Review of Science Fiction

“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”

John Clute

Interzone

“… squarely and ingeniously science fictional …”

Russell Letson

Locus

“McMullen has exquisitely crafted a world into which the reader falls into the atmosphere and glides along with the characters …”

Graham Holman

Australian Realms

“An exotic future Australia of wind-trains, warring federations and human-powered computers.”

Terry Dowling

The Australian

“… 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.”

Paul J. McAuley

Foundation