Two & a half millennia ago the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere & it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back. Banks is a phenomenon.. .wildly successful fearlessly creative William Gibson Thrilling affecting & comic.. .probably the finest science fiction he has written to date New Scientist Banks has rewritten the libretto for the whole space-opera genre The Times