Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Her world is one in which there is no great divide between the thinkers and the thoughtless, only a long continuum.

The Messenger has come down to us, she tells them. In that moment—out of her fear and her hope—she has quite convinced herself, because what has just happened is from so far beyond her experience that only that quintessential mystery can account for it.

Holsten Mason, historian, had now outlived the histories. Here he was, bumbling through time and space, making mistakes and being ineffectual, the one stable point in a moving universe.

Facing that long, cold oblivion, with no certainty that he would wake up again, it was curiously warming to know that someone, even if it was this cynical bitter woman, had been holding a torch for him all those unfelt years.