To Hold Infinity

by John Meaney

  “In To Hold Infinity, Meaney has achieved a cold fusion of post-cyberpunk tech noir with the expansive dreams of classic SF. The result is dark, complex, and glitters with brilliant strangeness.

  “Infinity held me from the bullet-spray prose of its opening. I was immersed in Meaney's fantastic yet plausible future—a future transformed by technology, a future where even death isn't the end of the adventure, a future where the cool philosophies of the East have merged with Western science. But the whole is cemented together by the complex but very human bond between a mother and her son.

  “John Meaney has rewired SF. Everything is different now.”

  —Stephen Baxter

  “Reading John Meaney's To Hold Infinity, it's impossible to believe this is a first novel. Dazzlingly imagined and dazzlingly executed, it involves the reader in a future as real and vividly present as one of the novel's neural visions, and as original. Net Angels, Luculenti, Shadow People—this is a work of true uniqueness by a true talent. Wow!”

  —Connie Willis

  Published 2006 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

  To Hold Infinity. Copyright © 2006 by John Meaney. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover illustration © Jim Burns

  Inquiries should be addressed to

  Pyr

  59 John Glenn Drive

  Amherst, New York 14228–2197

  VOICE: 716–691–0133, ext. 207

  FAX: 716–564–2711

  WWW.PYRSF.COM

  10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meaney, John.

  To hold infinity / John Meaney.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: London : Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers, 1998.

  ISBN-13: 978–1–59102–489–7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1–59102–489–7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978–1–59102–815–4 (ebook)

  1. Women biologists—Fiction. 2. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 3. Nanotechnology— Fiction. 4. Life on other planets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6113.E17T6 2006

  813'.6—dc22

  2006016168

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  Flicker. Blindspin. Darkplunge. Golden light-fragments rip apart cobra's death-promise eyes. Laughter spirals. A muted discord: cymbals clash. Light, and light, kaleidoscopic fireworks burst above, below, drowning distant muttering.

  Latch onto that. Ignore illusory cobras. The voice. Decode.

  Tetsuo's fingers flicker in a manic dance of control gestures. Clammy sweat breaking out—ignore—and a huge fragment breaks loose, unfurls in golden sheets of holographic text.

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