Loophole

Don’t poke your nose down a wormhole – you never know what you might find.
Two universes joined by a wormhole pair that forms a ‘loophole’, with an icemoon orbiting through the loophole, shared between two different planetary systems in the two universes.
A civilisation with uploaded minds in virtual reality served by artificial humans.
A ravening Horde of replicating machines that kill stars.
Real humans from a decrepit system of colony worlds.
A race of hyperintelligent but somewhat vague aliens.
Who will close the loophole… who will exploit it?
“When universes collide …
A multicosmos at war in a scenario of staggering, but scientifically authentic, invention …
As if the Marvel multiverse collided with 2001: A Space Odyssey …
I am awed, and I don’t awe easily. The highest of high-concept SF.”

–Stephen Baxter, award-winning author of the Xeelee sequence, Time Slip and many others.
“There’s Hard SF. There’s Wide-Screen Baroque. Now with Ian Stewart’s Loophole we have Wrap-Around Rococo. Daringly inventive, Loophole is a mind-fryingly, Möbius-twistingly intense SF adventure of the first order.”
–Henry Gee, Senior Editor at Nature, and author of A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth.
Cover art: David A. Hardy