Andrew Bannister – författare

The Spin – an ancient artificial cluster of eighty-eight planets and twenty-one suns – is in decline.For millennia, the people of Three Quarter Circle Harbour have watched the stars from their world, hidden in a forgotten corner of the Spin. Now something in the sky has changed and it will set them on a course to war and destruction.Seldyan is one of the band of renegades that has broken out of the vast slave colony of the Hive. Hijacking one of the last of the Spin’s great legacy warships, they wake its long-dormant intelligence and set a course that promises freedom.But as the ancient ship‘s memory returns, with it comes a terrifying knowledge – a dire warning about the future that has been concealed for ten thousand years . . .

It is a hundred millennia after Iron Gods. The Spin is nearing the end of its life. Its inhabitants are divided between those who live unknowingly in the relative paradise of one of hundreds of Virtual Realities – vrealities – and those who scrape a living in what remains of the real world.The massive servers needed to maintain the vrealities are draining the resources of the Spin. And an escalating, desperate and seemingly futile war has begun between those who tend the servers and those who believe they should be shut down, killing millions. But one amongst these unwitting combatants will discover the real nature of the vrealities – and his role in their fate.From a remote star system, a being has been observing the Spin for several lifetimes. He is Skarbo the Horologist and he is about to die for the very last time. He has come to accept that he will never visit the object of his studies but is coerced into making one last journey. His final destination lies across a war-torn galaxy. And there he will learn of the Spin’s past – and its astonishing future . . .Returning to the extraordinarily envisioned artificial planetary cluster called the Spin, Stone Clock is the dazzling new space opera from the acclaimed author of Creation Machine and Iron Gods.