The first book of Paul McAuley's I read was Fairlyland, and I was struck by both the depth of his worldbuilding and the deep sense of unsettling weirdness he conveys as his characters encounter their environments. Something Coming Through couples this approach with much tighter writing. The action is set post-First Contact; how the book got where it is from here is solidly reasoned and grounded but different enough to maintain interest. The plot skips backwards and forwards through the timeline in such a way that when the penny drops (which it does several times) the resulting "aha!" is very satisfying. The thread of each of the two main characters has its own tone. Web reporter Chloe's story is more YA-oriented - she's carried along by the flow of events until circumstances render her special and she realises that she has to look after herself; doing so brings mixed results. Meanwhile, grizzled offworld detective Vic is classic pulp/noir material, with an ex-wife, rookie partner and by-the-book department chief. In each case McAuley drops plenty of nods to their cultural predecessors and the book is stuffed with allusions and references. One character's name is a plug for the author's blog (and Twitter handle), which made me laugh. The mention of a famous film director having visited the distant planet's hotel while researching a sequel to his classic science fiction film also made me smile. Throughout, McAuley manages to keep the aliens refreshingly *alien*. Background, motives, allegiances and histories are alluded to, but not spelt out. There's a sense that there's much, much more going on than the characters know about.
The ending wraps things up while leaving threads to continue in the sequel, but - without going in to spoiler territory - the final action sequence seemed to slide past without much in the way of concrete description. I suspect this was a conscious decision to reflect the viewpoints of the two characters (there's no omniscient narrator to quote future encyclopedias at you here, and each character has only limited knowledge of what's going on) but it leaves interesting questions unresolved for subsequent stories about the Jackaroo. I did feel that some important things had occurred offstage and perhaps a third perspective would have revealed more.
This shouldn't put you off reading the book, though - I can genuinely say that I couldn't stop reading until I got to the end, at one o'clock this morning. I can't wait for "Into Everwhere", the next book in the series!
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![Something Coming Through by [Paul McAuley]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61YGV5LnzSL._SY346_.jpg)
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