Featured in Science Fiction: The Best 100 Novels
Winner of the British Science Fiction Award
Nominated for the Hugo Award
The "devilishly entertaining" masterpiece of hard science fiction, set
in a city moving through a strange, dystopian world--from the
multi-award-winning author of The Prestige (Time Out New York)
The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of
hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and
carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly
insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But
if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the
"optimum" into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed
life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.
The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its
inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured
on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed
circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire
necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city
is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is
dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but
surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum.
Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he
knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. But the world--he
is about to discover--is infinitely stranger than the strange world he
believes he knows so well.
