Galactic North

the servitor straddled the bore on skeletal leg

“But in due course you grew apart,” the Doctor said

Presently we arrived somewhere.

“As are we all,” Trintignant answered.

The procedure—then in its infancy—had the slight drawback that it killed the subject.

The pleasure is entirely mine,” he said.

He smiled and stepped closer: as tall and imposing as I remembered

The Ultras, the cyborg crews who control most of the starships featured in the sequence, are, I suppose, what Star Trek’s Borg would be like if the Borg took an unhealthy interest in Goth subculture. I got the idea of sleek, streamlined starships from Marshall T. Savage’s book The Millennial Project, which is a nonfiction treatise on galactic colonisation

Much of the hard SF furniture of my universe—slower-than-light travel, coldsleep, machine intelligences—draws from ideas and motifs in the work of Gregory Benford, especially his “Galactic Centre” sequence, beginning with In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns.

ve already mentioned Niven and Varley, but I owe an equally obvious debt to Bruce Sterling, whose “Shaper/Mechanist” sequence blew my mind on several levels.