This is my favourite kind of science fiction – big ideas used to explore big themes on a very personal scale. This is a first-contact story that explores all kinds of unforeseen consequences of faster-than-light travel. It’s reminiscent of both Cixin Liu and Ted Chiang.

If you had asked Miriam about tachyons before the First Transmission, she would have told you they were a mathematical quick of General Relativity, like seeing the blank space on a map and deciding “Here be dragons.” Of course the possibility of a mythical beast could be there, just unlikely.

But she couldn’t, wouldn’t, argue with hard proof, and like a lot of discoveries, such as finding the first exoplanet, she knew that once someone shows the world a thing that exists, it becomes easier to know where to look, and even more easy for someone to make money off of the discovery.

Miriam knew all this already. At this point, this knowledge was manageable, the Causality Syndrome contained. But still, she needed to start at the beginning to understand the real problem behind this new technology: humans.