On the Steel Breeze

On the Steel Breeze is a science fiction novel by the Welsh writer Alastair Reynolds, first published in 2013. It is the second part of his Poseidon's Children trilogy, after Blue Remembered Earth.

The novel is set in the twenty-fourth century, two hundred years after the earlier book, and covers a colonisation effort in which hundreds of immense generation ships known as holoships carry millions of humans towards extrasolar planets. The ships are pushed to relativistic speeds by engines based on an exotic technology called Chibesa physics, and they are in danger of overshooting their destinations because they may not have the fuel needed to decelerate.

Back in the Solar System, the ocean-dwelling transhumans of the United Aquatic Nations have become one of Earth's leading powers and the colonisation of Venus is under way. The main characters are two clones of Chiku Akinya, the daughter of a central figure in the previous novel, who had herself cloned centuries before so that she could experience three different ways of living: one clone stayed on Earth, and another went out on a holoship. The trilogy concludes with Poseidon's Wake.