Fix the past. Save the present. Stop the near future. Master of technology fiction Alastair Reynolds unfolds a time-traveling environment fiction adventure in Permafrost.

2080: at a remote control site over the edge of the Arctic Group, several scientists, engineers and physicians collect to gamble humanity’s future using one last-ditch test. Their goal: to produce a small alteration to the past, averting a worldwide catastrophe while at exactly the same time leaving recorded background intact. To help make the test work, they just need one last recruit: an ageing schoolteacher whose past due mother was the most important expert around the mathematics of paradox.

2028: a woman goes into medical procedures for regimen brain medical procedures. In the days following her operation, she begins to hear another voice in her head… an unwanted presence which seems to have a will, and an objective, all of its – one which will disrupt her lifestyle entirely. The only option remaining to her can be a straightforward one.

Does she resist … or turn into a collaborator?