Years after Ed Chianese’s fateful trip into the Kefahuchi Tract, the tract has begun to expand and change in ways we never could have predicted — and, even more terrifying, parts of it have actually begun to fall to Earth, transforming the landscapes they encounter.

Not far from Moneytown, in a neighborhood of underground clubs, body-modification chop shops, adolescent contract killers, and sexy streetwalking Monas, you’ll find the Saudade Event Site: a zone of strange geography, twisted physics, and frightening psychic onslaughts — not to mention the black and white cats that come pouring out at irregular intervals. Vic Serotonin is a “travel agent” into and out of Saudade. His latest client is a woman who’s nearly as unpredictable as the site itself — and maybe just as dangerous. She wants a tour just as a troubling new class of biological artifacts are leaving the site — living algorithms that are transforming the world outside in inexplicable and unsettling ways. Shadowed by a metaphysically inclined detective determined to shut his illegal operation down, Vic must make sense of a universe rapidly veering toward a virulent and viral form of chaos… and a humanity almost lost.

2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award
2007 Philip K. Dick Award