For Malcolm Eduards, David Pringle, and Chris Schelling

Vacuum Diagrams is a novel based on the short stories which — together with my novels Raft (1991), Timelike Infinity (1992), Flux (1993), and Ring (1994) — comprise my “Xeelee Sequence” Future History.

The stories, written between 1987 and 1995, have been revised for this edition; a new timeline is appended; references to the novels are included as footnotes, and a new short story ("Eve") has been included as bridging material.

Of the twenty-two stories included here, four were first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, one in SF Age, one in a Writers Of The Future anthology, and eight in Interzone. Two ("Lieserl” and “Cilia-of-Gold") have been included in annual Legend Year’s Best SF collections, edited by Gardner Dozois. The other stories mostly appeared in small-press magazines and, while fans are aware of the pieces, they have been largely unavailable before this collection.

The Ghost cruiser hovered between Earth and Moon.

The ship was a rough ovoid, woven from silvered rope. Instrument clusters and energy pods were knotted to the walls. Around me, Ghosts clung to the rope like grapes to a vine.

The blue of crescent Earth shimmered over their pulsating, convex surfaces.

Earth folded up and disappeared.

The first hyperspace hop was immense, thousands of light years long. Then, in a succession of bewildering leaps, we sailed out of the Galaxy.

We fell obliquely to the plane of the disc. The core was a chandelier of pink-white light, thousands of light years across, hanging over my head. Spiral arms — cloudy, streaming — moved serenely above me. There were blisters of gas sprinkled along the arms, I saw, bubbles of swollen colour.