(The Spin Trilogy 2)

Iron Gods

The author of the acclaimed Creation Machine returns to the extraordinary artificial planetary cluster of the Spin with his dazzling new novel - a work of thrilling, heart-in-mouth space opera - a must-read for fans of SF bestsellers such as Iain M. Banks, Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds.

Bannister has the knack of making the  extraordinary seem normal and the normal seem extraordinary. It all comes together in dazzling, pin-sharp storytelling, where humour. acute social commentary and some terrific aliens jostle together.

Wonderful . . . a worthy successor to the potential realised in Creation Machine. There’s some really big ideas here. I suspect I am only just comprehending the true ambition of these books. I really like this series.

Ancient, brooding technologies...Renegade slaves in a stolen starships...In Bannister’s hands space opera lives on, gaudy and brutal and glorious. The Spin Doctor is back.

With Bannister's debut novel, Creation Machine, we seemed to have struck a nugget of SF gold. With Iron Gods our luck continues and it seems that with this new author we may well have found a vein of the stuff.

Born in 1965, Andrew Bannister grew up in Cornwall. He studied Geology at Imperial College and went to work in the North Sea before becoming an Environmental Consultant. For the day job, he specialises in green transport and corporate sustainability, but he has always written – initially for student newspapers and fanzines before moving on, encouraged by creative writing courses, to fiction. He’s always been a reader and has loved science fiction since childhood. From the classics of the 50s and 60s to the present day, he’s wanted it all: space, stars, astonishment and adventure - and now he’s discovered that writing it is even better. Andrew lives in Leicestershire.

The Spin – an ancient artificial cluster of eighty-eight planets and twenty-one suns – is in decline. 
 
For millennia, the people of Three Quarter Circle Harbour have watched the stars from their world, hidden in a forgotten corner of the Spin. Now something in the sky has changed and it will set them on a course to war and destruction. 
 
Seldyan is one of the band of renegades that has broken out of the vast slave colony of the Hive. Hijacking one of the last of the Spin’s great legacy warships, they wake its long-dormant intelligence and set a course that promises freedom. 
 
But as the ancient ship‘s memory returns, with it comes a terrifying knowledge – a dire warning about the future that has been concealed for ten thousand years . . .

(The Spin Trilogy 1)

Creation Machine

For readers of Peter F. Hamilton, James S. A. Corey, Alastair Reynolds and Iain M. Banks, CREATION MACHINE is the stunning first instalment in an SF sequence - The Spin trilogy - set within an artificial planetary cluster with a turbulent past and an even more violent present . . .

In the vast, artificial galaxy called The Spin, a rebellion has been crushed. 
 
Viklun Haas, industrialist and leader of the victorious Hegemony, is eliminating all remnants of the opposition. Starting with his daughter. 
 
But Fleare Haas has had time to plan her next move: a break for freedom that will take her across The Spin to the cluster of fallen planets known as the Catastrophe Curve – from exile to the very frontiers of a new war. 
 
Because word has reached the brutal, despotic empire of The Fortunate of a most unusual piece of plunder from its latest invasion. 
 
For hundreds of millions of years, the planets and stars of The Spin have been the only testament to the god-like engineers that created them. Now, beneath the surface of a ruined planet, one of their machines has been found . . .

Debut novelist Andrew Bannister comes to the genre with his talents fully formed in the ambitious, compulsively readable Creation Machine . . . [it] has everything: intriguing far-future societies, exotic extra-terrestrial races, artificial galaxies and alien machines dormant for millions of years. Bannister holds it all together with enviable aplomb.

Balancing bursts of action with expansive world-building, immersive prose and sharp dialogue, Bannister has written a colourful debut that conjures up the same kind of gnarly, lurid weirdness that made Iain M. Banks’ SF epics so memorable.

An excellent read that ticked the boxes for me. Augmented humans up to and including one as a cloud of nanomachines, Banksian drones and cruel politics. Grotesque and interesting alien life, and characters I cared about - all written in an engaging style.

A thrilling debut . . . delivers in spades everything I’m looking for in a Space Opera – imaginative settings, strange aliens, an arsenal of unusual weapons, and, most of all, characters I like and who I want to know what happens to them. This is a book that is fast-paced and stylish, but not one where its literary merits outweigh its sheer enthusiasm and sense of enjoyment . . . It reminded me of the first Peter F. Hamilton I read in its sense of epic-ness, or the first Iain (M.) Banks I read in its intelligent plotting and its sense of humour . . . I can’t recommend this one highly enough . . . should be a monster.

Bannister's a fresh, vivid and inventive voice, and Creation Machine's epic roller-coaster gives modern space opera a much-needed shot in the arm. The scale is Cinemascope, but he keeps a clear and intelligent focus on his characters, settings and ideas.

I really enjoyed Creation Machine: fast-paced, intelligent SF, action-packed and immersive.

ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY, author of Children of Time

Bannister's exemplary world building brings a sense of awe to Creation Machine - you can't help but marvel at his descriptive prowess . . . a beautiful space opera.

Great action, surprisingly morbid humour and great characters . . . enjoyable and accessible.

A spectacular plunge into the deep end of wide-screen space opera . . . such an engaging novel with a good plot, plenty of sense-of-wonder, style and brio propelling matters . . . with Creation Machine we could be witnessing the birth of a new star in the SFnal firmament. Sun glasses please, we are in The Spin.

If you enjoy fast-moving adventures set on strange planets and involving alien species, inventive technology, heroic class warriors, Machiavellian politics — and heavy drinking in space bars — you will welcome this new British writer with open arms. And, if you do, you’ll be pleased to hear that a sequel, set 10,000 years later, is due out any day.

Andrew Bannister

(The Spin Trilogy 3)

It is a hundred millennia after Iron Gods. The Spin is nearing the end of its life. 
 
Its inhabitants are divided between those who live unknowingly in the relative paradise of one of hundreds of Virtual Realities – vrealities – and those who scrape a living in what remains of the real world. 
 
The massive servers needed to maintain the vrealities are draining the resources of the Spin. And an escalating, desperate and seemingly futile war has begun between those who tend the servers and those who believe they should be shut down, killing millions. But one amongst these unwitting combatants will discover the real nature of the vrealities – and his role in their fate. 
 
From a remote star system, a being has been observing the Spin for several lifetimes. He is Skarbo the Horologist and he is about to die for the very last time. He has come to accept that he will never visit the object of his studies but is coerced into making one last journey. His final destination lies across a war-torn galaxy. And there he will learn of the Spin’s past – and its astonishing future . . . 
 
Returning to the extraordinarily envisioned artificial planetary cluster called the Spin, Stone Clock is the dazzling new space opera from the acclaimed author of Creation Machine and Iron Gods.

Andrew Bannister

Books by Andrew Bannister

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