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Science Fiction
Yeva Sarkissian puts a clean borehole through the West Antarctic ice sheet into Lake Halvorsen, and four minutes after she shuts down a pump to change a filter, an oxygen electrode three centimetres inside the sediment steps, and holds. The floor of the lake is one continuous, electrically conductive organism, and it has begun keeping time with their machinery.
Yeva Sarkissian has drilled ninety-one kilometres of ice in her life and she keeps the number. On the nineteenth of December she puts a clean borehole through the West Antarctic ice sheet into Lake Halvorsen, and at 03:48 she shuts down a pump to change a filter cartridge. Four minutes later, an oxygen electrode three centimetres inside the sediment steps, and holds. The floor of Lake Halvorsen is one continuous, electrically conductive organism, and it has begun keeping time with their machinery. It answers on a cycle of eleven days. It counts. And every answer costs it something, because the only thing anyone can send down a borehole is oxygen, and oxygen is the one thing that floor has never had. The season ends on the eighth of February. After that there are no aircraft until spring, the National Science Foundation has ordered the hole sealed, and the correct thing to do, and everybody in the room agrees it is the correct thing to do, is to close it and never open another one. Nine of them stay. The Oxygen Wound is hard science fiction built out of real drills, real chemistry and real law. It is a first-contact novel with no villain in it, in which the only vocabulary either party has is arithmetic, and in which every institution behaves reasonably and that is the problem. It is about competence at the edge of what machinery can do, about a scale that has not noticed us, and about what love has to become to fit through a very small channel. Twenty-one messages. Eleven days between each one. Somebody has to decide what the last one says. Content note: Please know what you are buying. There is no villain in this book. Nobody is rescued. The arithmetic is on the page and you are expected to follow it. The central question is never resolved, because the instruments cannot resolve it. If that is the book you want, this is very much that book.
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The Oxygen Wound is out today, on Kindle and in paperback. Three hundred and fifty-two pages. Please know what you are buying. There is no villain in this book. Nobody is rescued. The arithmetic is…
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