Peter Watts - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

Peter Wattsis a brilliant bastard of a science fiction writer, whose grimscenarios are matched by their scientific speculation; in his latest, anovella called The Freeze-Frame Revolution ,Watts imagines a mutiny that stretches out across aeons, fought againsta seemingly omnipotent AI. This is definitely vintage Watts, from theElder Gods the Eri discovers as it traverses the wormholes it creates,to the imaginative tortures the mutineers use to punish those whobetray the rebellion.

Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and Walkaway

A grippingstory of a deep human futurethe dependent relationship between humanand AI tangles and grows with the delicious creep of suspense to thevery last page. Watts is a poet when it comes to science.

Justina Robson, author of Keeping it Real

If you everdoubted that the core of all good science fiction is still the humanheart, here comes Peter Watts to ram the point home. The Freeze Frame Revolution is the purest driven high concept SF, told across scales of time andspace to daunt all but the very finest Space Opera practitioners, andyet it remains as vivid and carnal and profane as the headiest ofhigh-end literature.

Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon

Darkness and awesome technology lurk in The Freeze-Frame Revolution .

Vernor Vinge, author of A Fire Upon the Deep

Watts takesfamiliar-seeming SF tropes and accelerates them towards lightspeed,until they become something chillingly other. A gripping tale wheregalactic timescales collide with biology and age-old human dilemmas.

Hannu Rajaniemi, author of Summerland and The Quantum Thief

Fast, rich, and cool The Freeze-Frame Revolution fascinates!

Greg Bear, author of Eon and Take Back the Sky

In The Freeze-Frame Revolution ,Peter Watts takes us millions of years into the future and hundreds oflight-years away, where an isolated fragment of humanity must confrontexotic physics, unfathomable entities, and the unforeseen consequencesof their own technologies... A brilliant, thoughtful story burstingwith radical ideas.

David D. Levine, author of the Arabella of Mars trilogy

The Freeze-Frame Revolution is a slow-motion rebellion as heart-stopping as any roller coaster rideand will delight readers across the science fiction spectrum. It was ajoy to read and I found myself unable to put it down once I gotstarted.

K. B. Wagers, author of Before the Throne

Entertaining and provocative, brilliant and ambitious, The Freeze-Frame Revolution is compelling science fiction with heart.

Foreword , starred review

Peter Wattsis a triple threat: exacting hard science extrapolation, an imaginationthat runs hot enough to give you contact burns, and a gift forthrusting his characters in situations that will expand the mind whileshattering even the most guarded of reader hearts.

A. M. Dellamonica, author of Indigo Springs

Starfish (1999)

Maelstrom (2001)

ehemoth (2004)

Firefall series

Blindsight (2006)

Echopraxia (2014)

Short fiction

Beyond the Rift (2013)

The Freeze-Frame Revolution

Copyright 2018 by Peter Watts

Thisis a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitiousand any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book orportions thereof in any form without the express permission of theauthor and the publisher.

Cover and interior design by Elizabeth Story

Grav Profile 2018 by Peter Watts

Tachyon Publications LLC

1459 18th Street #139

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.tachyonpublications.com

tachyon@tachyonpublications.com

Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

Project Editor: Jill Roberts

Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-252-4

Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-010-0

First Edition: 2018

In memory of Banana/Chip.

They hated each other.

BACK WHEN WE FIRST SHIPPED OUT I played this game with myself. Every time I thawed, Id tally up thelength of our journey so far; then check to see when wed be if Eriophora were a time machine, if wed been moving back through history insteadof out through the cosmos. Oh look: all the way back to the IndustrialRevolution in the time it took us to reach our first build. Two buildstook us to the Golden Age of Islam, seven to the Shang Dynasty.

I guess itwas my way of trying to keep some kind of connection, to measure thismost immortal of endeavors on a scale that meat could feel in the gut. I t didnt work out, though. Did exactly the opposite in fact, ended up rubbing my nose in the sheer absurd hubris of even trying to contain the Diaspora within the pitiful limits of earthbound history.

Forstarters, the Chimp didnt thaw anyone out until the seventh gate,almost six thousand years into the mission; I slept through almost allof human civilization, didnt even wake up until the fall of theMinoans. I think Kai may have been on deck for the Pyramid of Cheops,but by the time Chimpcalled me back from the crypt we were all the way into the last IceAge. After that we were passing through the Paleolithic: five thousandgates builtonly three hundred requiring meat on deckand wed barelyfinished our first circuit of the Milky Way.

I gave up after Australopithecus . It had been a stupid game, a childs game, doomed from the start. We were just cavemen. Only the mission was transcendent.

I dont know exactly what moved me to pick up that kiddie pastime again. Id learned my lesson the first time around, and s paceitself has only grown vaster in the meantime. But I gave it anothershot, after everything went south: called up the clocks, subtracted thecenturies. Weve been around the disk thirty-two times now, left over ahundred thousand gates in our wake. Weve scoured so many raw materialsthat God, looking down from overhead, could probably trace out our pathby the jagged spiral of tiny bubbles sucked clean of ice and gravel.

Sixty-sixmillion years, by the old calendar. Thats how long weve been on theroad. All the way back to the end of the Cretaceous.

Give or take a few millennia, the revolution happened on the day one of Eriophora s pint-sized siblings punched Earth in the face and wiped out the dinosaurs.

I dont know why, but I find that kind of funny.