Contact
The substrate responds. The oldest conversation begins.
The third book in The Substrate Series. The signal is no longer passive. Something is listening, and now it speaks.
For readers of Ted Chiang, Richard Powers, and Andy Weir.
Description
The signal has been confirmed by seventeen independent research teams across nine countries. The substrate — the attending mind beneath the fabric of space — is real. The question is no longer whether it exists. The question is what it wants.
Contact is the third book in The Substrate Series — the book in which the conversation begins. Elena Vasquez, now the most famous and most controversial physicist alive, must navigate the collision between a discovery that changes everything and a world that is not ready to be changed.
The physics is real. The quantum field theory is published. The attending mind is not metaphor.
For readers of Stanisław Lem, Ted Chiang, and Richard Powers.
For Readers Of
"For readers of Ted Chiang, Richard Powers, and Andy Weir."
Reader reviews and press quotes will appear here as they arrive.
An Extract
The press conference was Elena's idea. She had been advised against it by everyone — her department chair, the facility director, three separate lawyers, and Yusuf, who had looked at her with the expression of a person watching someone walk toward something they cannot be stopped from walking toward.
She had held it anyway.
The room held four hundred journalists and was connected by satellite to approximately eight hundred million people. Elena stood at the podium and looked at the cameras and thought about what she was about to say and whether she was ready to say it.
She was not ready. She said it anyway.
"The substrate of reality is not a field or a force. It is an attending mind. We have made contact with it. It has responded. The conversation has begun."
