Terminal World

Spearpoint, home to over thirty million people, is a vast artificial spire divided into "zones" — regions where the fundamental laws of physics differ, from steam-age Neon Heights near the base to the posthuman Celestial levels at its peak. When a dying "angel" — a posthuman from the highest zones — falls to Neon Heights, pathologist Quillon is the one who receives the body, and learns he was secretly part of a project testing whether angels could survive in the lower zones.

Marked for death by factions hunting the project's results, Quillon flees Spearpoint with the extraction specialist Meroka just as a catastrophic "zone storm" rearranges the world's physics overnight and plunges the entire city into darkness. Rescued by the airship nation of Swarm, Quillon is drawn into a much larger, stranger conflict than the one he fled. Alastair Reynolds blends steampunk aesthetics with hard science fiction in this genre-bending standalone.