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Something Coming ThroughSomething Coming Through is a 2015 novel by Paul J. McAuley featuring elements of science fiction and crime fiction.
Plot
The novel follows two characters in alternating chapters. The first plot thread focuses on Chloe Millar, a young British woman with a knack for distinguishing real Elder Culture artifacts for fakes, whose mother was killed during the Spasm in a nuclear explosion at Trafalgar Square. She works for Disruption Theory, a company that investigates the psychological and social changes wrought by contact with the Jackaroo and Elder Culture artifacts. While investigating a breakout of cult-like behavior possibly related to contact with an Elder Culture artifact (many of which have the effect of producing phantom-like images called eidolons when people approach or handle them, and/or induce compulsions to convey alien ideas and images), she meets with a teenage boy who is driven to draw pictures of a strange alien landscape and his young sister who seems to be in mental contact with an alien entity. Chloe senses that the boy's pictures depict a real place, and when the children disappear from their residence, she has various adventures finding and helping them.
The second plot thread follows Vic Gayle, formerly of Birmingham, England, now a police detective in Petra, capital city of Mangala. In the course of investigating the murder of someone recently arrived on the shuttle from Earth, he is drawn into a conflict among members of a British organized crime group operating on Mangala, which has a particular interest in a certain Elder Culture site on the planet.
The chapters of the novel are dated, and at the beginning the chapters describing Gayle's activities have dates about two weeks after those describing Millar's. It becomes apparent that the crimes Gayle is investigating are the results of events that Millar and the two children were involved in, and the plot threads gradually come together and unite time-wise.
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