The House of Styx
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Discover the beginnings of the Quantum Evolution with The House of Styx, the start of a groundbreaking new series set 250 years before The Quantum Magician.
Life can exist anywhere. And anywhere there is life, there is home.
In the swirling clouds of Venus, the families of la colonie live on floating plant-like trawlers, salvaging what they can in the fierce acid rain and crackling storms. Outside is dangerous, but humankind’s hold on the planet is fragile and they spend most of their days simply surviving.
But Venus carries its own secrets, too. In the depths, there is a wind that shouldn’t exist.
And the House of Styx wants to harness it.
“Künsken’s vivid worldbuilding is a knockout…This is a must-read” – Publishers Weekly, starred review
“An audacious con job, scintillating future technology, and meditations on the nature of fractured humanity” - Yoon Ha Lee on The Quantum Magician
“Technology changes us—even our bodies—in fundamental ways, and Künsken handles this wonderfully” - Cixin Liu on The Quantum Magician
“Künsken has a wonderfully ingenious imagination.” – Adam Roberts, Locus
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Human society is complicated—even on another planet. It’s the 23rd century, and colonists from the sovereign nation of Quebec are making a life for themselves on Venus, avoiding the planet’s inhospitable surface by hovering in artificial habitats among the atmosphere’s deadly sulphuric clouds. Yes, Derek Künsken’s science fiction novel is exciting and futuristic, but it also draws us into the super-relatable stories of the families living this hardscrabble life. When politics—and a game-changing scientific discovery—threaten their already-tenuous grasp on the planet, long-simmering tensions threaten to tip the colony into an all-out civil war. We were wowed by Künsken’s sophisticated world-building, his poetic descriptions of the colonists’ creative engineering, and the emotionally intense coming-of-age stories of the book’s younger pioneers. Awesomely intersectional and packed full of French swear words, The House of Styx is a great scientific adventure!
