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prose stub

Down was the sixty-sixth Virgin New Adventures novel. It featured a reappearance of the People, who were introduced in Ben Aaronovitch's The Also People.

Publisher's summary[]

Mankind expects pain. However it seems to outsiders.

Tyler's Folly: a colony world on the unattractive side of Earthspace, a planet wracked by earthquakes and crawling with off-world bodysnatchers. When the local authorities pull a bedraggled Professor Bernice Summerfield out of the ocean in an off-limits 'quake zone, they naturally want to know what she is doing there... but the professor can only mumble something about woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers.

According to Bernice, the planet is hollow, its interior inhabited by warring tribes of cavemen and strangely unconvincing prehistoric monsters. Some dark and ancient god rules this underground kingdom -- albeit a dark and ancient god with a penchant for thirties pulp adventures and Saturday morning action serials.

Can Bernice's claims be true? Is Tyler's Folly really under threat from an ageless subterranean horror? And why does so much of her story revolve around the utterly amoral alien known as !X...?

Plot[]

to be added

Characters[]

Worldbuilding[]

Books[]

Law and order[]

Locations[]

Organisations[]

Planets[]

Psychology[]

  • Teleportaphobia also known as "Molecular Vertigo" is described here as the fear of matter transmission.

Species[]

  • Katastrophen is reminded of buffo frogs.

Vehicles[]

  • The SSSSSSS submarine uses warp drive but goes through oceans between planets instead of space.

Notes[]

  • The introduction of Down listed a web address (www.ndirect.co.uk/shebeen) stated to contain background material to the novel. Though the link is no longer active, the novel's glossary, footnotes, and appendices were archived here.
  • Down re-introduces the People. This includes Ben Aaronovitch's unique pronunciations for their names; a full explanation can be found in the introduction to The Also People.
  • The submarine was originally intended to be black, but after the cover artist rendered it as pink, Miles rewrote its colour.[1]

Continuity[]

External links[]

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