First off, this isn't a typical Amazon title, rather it is the product of PS Publishing, which puts out limited, signed editions by various science fiction and fantasy authors. Specifically, "The Human Front" was limited to 400 hardcover and another 500 paperback copies, all of which have long since sold out from the publisher. That said, there are copies available on the internet, and fans of alternate history will definitely want to track this one down.

As I alluded to above, "The Human Front" is Ken MacLeod's take on alternate history, but anyone who knows MacLeod knows it will be anything but conventional. Actually, it does start off conventionally enough: it's the early 1960's and World War III has been raging with varying degrees of ferocity since 1949. Joe Stalin is a romanticized guerrilla fighter in the model of Che, and the Soviet Union has been beaten down to the point where the allies have installed a government in Petrograd.

Macleod rather cleverly juxtaposes roles in this world; in addition to Stalin, JFK is reviled as a butcher ("Hey, Hey, JFK, how many kids have you killed today?"). By so doing, he obliterates the myths of the past, and rather shrewdly, points out that historical interpretation is largely a function of the circumstances in which one lives, or more simply, a result of how the past turned out. While he is no apologist for Stalin (by any stretch) he creates a plausible reality where he is revered as a pragmatic, dedicated revolutionary, rather than reviled as a butcher. Thus removed from our known context he can create an absurd inversion that nonetheless sheds light on how we view our own heroes.

However, instead of following this believable alternate reality to a logical conclusion, MacLeod throws a curveball in the main character, John Matheson's, enigmatic encounter with one of the U.S.'s strange disc shaped bombers. Although the next twenty pages of narrative are fairly conventional, MacLeod has set the stage, and everything thereafter is tainted by this puzzling mystery.

To go any further would spoil the plot, but suffice it to say that the novel takes numerous bizarre twists before arriving at a fascinating ending. Specifically, unlike most Alternate History, which revels in an outcome discrete from reality, MacLeod attempts to reconcile his world to our own in a manner reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle". The mechanism of this reconciliation is completely original without being outlandish, and the statement made is simple but profound. In essence, MacLeod is arguing that we are all victims of circumstance, that, generally speaking, shaping the world's destiny is beyond the individual. Thus, it is left to each of us to live as best we can, in the hopes that the cumulative result is something better than where we started. At the same time, unlike much Alternate History, (and particularly what one would expect from such a politically conscious writer) MacLeod isn't entirely displeased with the path history has taken, and actually seems to find it better than many of the alternatives.

MacLeod packs more into the seventy-five pages of "The Human Front" than most authors do in novels four times as long. He has blended so many genres, I've lost count, and it's almost unfair to categorize it as Alternate History, in spite of the fact that it won the Sidewise Award for best Short Form Alternate History in 2001. Rather, MacLeod created a true SF hybrid, that evokes the best of many different themes. At the same time, he has written a character driven novel that explores some interesting themes around meaning and purpose. Ultimately, this is a work of literature in which the content far surpasses what one might expect from the length.

Jake Mohlman

In here are 5 different stories from 5 different authors. But somehow they all are connected by the same themes and characters.

I managed to read this book within a week. I found it to be well written and easy to understand. It contains short sentences that are easy to absorb. I suspect it may have been written for teenagers.
I'm bewildered as to why no one has reviewed this classic book. It's an honour and privilege for me to review it.

While it may have been aimed for a younger market the themes in it are ageless and timeless. Mature readers will appreciate it too. What I loved about it was how my current net experience, while relatively plain, simple and uneventful, is correlated to this future vision of spectacular marvel. In one word, it's fascinating how it views the future of virtual reality and the (hopefully) future eventuating of how the Internet will prosper and develop to encompass our daily lives. I just loved how it projects people into simulated worlds like a cat with nine lives. From history to future space everything and anything is imagined within the Web 2028 and with vivid, exciting detail that humans can only dream of happening in their wildest fantasies..

Overall I recommend this book. While I'm normally a sci-fi fan who liked Star Wars, X Files etc. this book appealed to me. I recommend it for all ages especially the young. I dare say it's better than Harry Potter as it's relevant to the current Zeigiest way of life and modern pop culture. Who wants to read about witches and magic when you can summon visions of a promising and idealized utopian high tech future. [Forget} Potter and Lord Of The Rings, read this book NOW!!!

The Stone Canal is Ken MacLeod's second novel. It is in the same future history as his first novel (The Star Fraction) and his third novel (The Cassini Division) but it can be read without difficulty on its own, and I found it to stand alone just fine. At a first brush, MacLeod reads like "Iain Banks meets Bruce Sterling". The novel's opening, with a somewhat smart-alecky "human- equivalent" robot briefing a confused newly-awakened man, and its structure, alternating chapters on different timelines, definitely echo some of Banks' work. (Note that Banks acknowledges MacLeod's help with Use of Weapons, in terms which suggest to me that he may have helped with that book's unusual structure.) The deeply political concerns, and central character's habit of talking at length about politics, as well as some of the technology and the attitude towards technology, reminded me of Sterling (and also, in a different way, Kim Stanley Robinson. Which is to say, at times this book is a bit talky.) But in the final analysis, The Stone Canal is a very original, very impressive novel. It's true SF, chock full of sense of wonder concepts, interested in new technology, in future politics, and in how technology affects politics (and human life in general).

The novel opens with a man awakening in the desert of a Mars-like planet, accompanied by a "human-equivalent" robot. Soon we meet another robot, Dee Model, this one a "gynoid" (female android), who has escaped her owner (for whom she was a sex toy), and is proclaiming her autonomy. The man is soon revealed to be Jonathan Wilde, a legendary figure of political resistance among the inhabitants of New Mars, and the gynoid is based on a clone of Wilde's long-dead wife. The two encounter each other, and both end up in the hands of the "abolitionist" movement, which favors freeing intelligent robots from human slavery. Soon they are jointly involved in lawsuits brought by Dee Model's owner, who is Wilde's friend, long time rival, and apparent murderer, Dave Reid.

This seems like plenty of background for a novel in itself, especially given the interesting environment of New Mars, with its single City, 5/6 of which is given over to "wild machines", and with the pervasive semi-VR technology, the grounds for speculation about the nature of human vs. machine intelligence, and the semi-anarchist political structure of the colony. But in parallel tracks we follow the early life, on roughly present-day Earth, of Jonathan Wilde, Dave Reid, and the two important women in their lives: Myra and Annette. Reid is a diehard Trotskyite socialist, and Wilde an anarchist and "space nut"; and the tension between their political views, as well as the tension resulting from their relationships with the two women, is followed over the decades. Both men become very powerful in the decaying near-future environment; as both in their ways push to open up space travel for people in general.

The two timelines inevitably converge, and the real concern of the novel comes clear: understanding of the nature of the "fast folk" (originally human simulations run on very fast computer hardware), and understanding the link between New Mars and Earth. MacLeod speculates fascinatingly on nanotechnology, virtual reality, and astrophysics. Everything is well-tied together in the end, although in a slightly disappointing manner. (The first and last lines of The Stone Canal, by the way, are both stunners, if a bit contrived also (as overtly "stunning" lines often are).) The characters of Wilde and Reid are very well presented, though the female characters are a bit sketchier. The novel's weaknesses are an occasional tendency to talkiness, the rather familiar setup of the relationship of the main characters, along with their realization of enormous political power, and the slight flatness of the ending. But all in all this is an excellent pure SF novel, and one which bodes well for a career to watch.

Out of the first five books Ken Macleoud has had published only the last one 'Cosmonauts Keep' I will never reread. All of the first four are well worth rereading, the mark of a good book.
'The Stone Canal' has the great structure Macleoud does so well, of alternating chapters telling the story from centuries past of the character's. While the next chapter carrys on in the present and so on.
It was KM who advised Bank's of this for his great 'Use of Weapons' novel. Back to the Stone Canal. It's packed with ideas, intensity and thriller like page turning. It could easily fall back into a revenge and killing book. Let's face it the main character has many good reasons to kill Reid. It's about myths, love and reality. It's fun and smart. Macleoud doesn't have the same strength and depth in description as say Banks or Dan Simmon's at their best but he writes very good books, compressed, full of twists, ideas and smart characters.

I originally found out about Ken MacLeod through some interviews with Iain Banks, one of my favorite authors of both sci-fi and non-genre fiction. And my first foray into his universe was The Stone Canal.

While The Stone Canal is a relatively short book, it's absolutely packed with ideas and is not a light read by any stretch of the imagination. The plot follows two distinct time-lines giving readers a history of the events that happen in the more distant future portion of the book. While the basis of all conflict in the novel (and the others in this 'universe') is the practice of communism, the arguments and diatribes by the characters and some of the events themselves seem tedious. It is idea-driven science fiction but the over-explanation of these ideas slows the action of the book down making it tedious in places.

I have the rest of the books in this series and I'm eager to read them. However I do hope that MacLeod allows the overriding political concepts behind his novels to remain in the background and let his other very creative and brilliant ideas shine in future works. So I give The Stone Canal five stars for creativity, some great characters and wonderful world-building but three for the uneven pacing of the book. Hence the four stars.

First of all, I do recommend this book to everybody that enjoys some near-future what-if books that mixes politics, artificial intelligence possibilities, and loads of technology.

The good things about it would first be the ability to really shape a very interesting reality, very well built characters, many thought-provoking discussions, in the political, social and technological fields. In a way the story is very believable (maybe not in 40 years), and very fast paced.

Now the reason why I didn't rate it a 5 stars is that sometimes it becomes too "thick". Too many things happen without much explanation, and the author seems to be looking for that. I remember finishing the first chapter of the book and just thinking to myself "What? What is going on here?". Little by little you start to get used to the acronyms, the political system, and the pace of the book and then it becomes really interesting. Just be ready for this "shock" if you plan on reading it.

For now I'll move into a new book and then go back and read another of his Fall Revolution series books. Now that I know what he is talking about maybe it will be easier to finish the next one.

I believe that I originally found Ken MaCleod's "Cosmonaut Keep" on the bookshelf at a store and found the description for it to be extraordinarily interesting. That being said, I decided to research and find out what the authors first book was. Upon discovering the Fall Revolution Sequence did not have to be read in any particular order, I decided to order and read the Star Fraction before the others, just to put my own sense of order to it.

Upon beginning this book, I found that a sense of order to the book itself was to some extent difficult to discern. Bear in mind that in several sequences I found the author's style to actually be very exciting and captivating, which lends to the idea that his later books will be very exciting. For a huge portion of the book though, I found his writing style to be somewhat cryptic, plodding and convoluted in the set up of the action sequences. This book is replete with varying political and social views that at times will leave your head spinning as to which direction the book is taking you.

Overall, this novel for me was a worthwhile read, just not overly compelling. At some point in time, after some further reflection, I will pick up the next book, "The Stone Canal" and read it. The conclusion to this one just doesn't compel me to do so at this time.

The premise: MINOR SPOILERS

This tome is about a dismal future of the early 2040's after a brief third world war, the US/UN has taken hegemony over a balkanized world. The Fall Revolution Sequence itself is an attempt to put an end to this new world order and reunify fragmented nations.

A key player in the Fall Revolution is an extremely interesting character by the name of Moh Kohn. His father Josh Kohn was the one who wrote many of the revolutionary programs that runs the computers of this society, which play a key part in the society. Moh Kohn himself is a security mercenary, living in a commune who believes in many of the communist ideas. Through chance, he meets with Janis Taine, who is a scientist working on memory enhancing drugs. This meeting is what basically begins the Fall Revolution. {ssintrepid}

Fast-paced and a fun read. All of the usual cyberpunk elements are there, with the addition of some complicated socialist politics. Long on action, short on characterization. Several different cultures that aren't explored in depth. Major historic events, any one of which would probably be a book in itself, that seem more like backdrop than real things happening to large numbers of people. (A major change in America happens just like that.) Like a lot of cyberpunk, the treatment of computers and AI is a bit too magical for my taste. But certainly good enough for an action movie - err, book.

Macleod's fifth novel - or his second, if you want to treat the first four as a single work - is slow to get going. At page fifty I was beginning to wonder if I really wanted to finish it. But when Macleod's two storylines finally get up to speed, they're compulsive. Having finished the book, my chief reservation is the sense that Macleod hasn't served up anything new: tandem storylines set in the near future and in a space-colonisation future, humans struggling with the implications of nanoscale, superintelligent minds, lovelorn heroes and heroines... it all seemed a bit like a retread. Fun to read, and I'll certainly be picking up the sequel - but if you haven't read Macleod before, start with his earlier ones. They're better.

For some reason Ken MacLeod insists upon withholding key information about (A) the time relationships between the two story lines of this novel, and (B) the background history of his fictional universe. Worse yet, I can't see that this obfuscation helps to move the plot along in any way. It just made this reader confused, hoping that the author would at some point deign to explain what's going on. He eventually does, and the book concludes in a satisfactory manner. But a couple of times I almost gave up and chucked it in my library's donation bin out of frustration.

If you want a few hints that are not really plot spoilers:
1. Matt Cairns is the ancestor of Gregor Cairns.
2. The Matt Cairns storyline takes place in near future, and Gregor Cairns storyline takes place in a more distant future.
3. There's a hierarchy of intelligences in this fictional universe: our hominid cousins (the pithkies), humans, the saurs (intelligent dinosaurs), the krakens, the Grays, the gods (some sort of sentient colonial micro-organism). Pithkies, humans, saurs, and krakens all originated on Earth and were exported (over the eons) to the surrounding planetary systems by the gods, greys, and/or some other intelligent life form.
4. The immortality of the original cosmonaut crew is not explained until the end of the novel, and then only in passing. The implications are that everyone back on Earth are now immortal, too. (Will this be a key fact to know in the next novels in this series?)

Never fear. Half way through this novel, most of your questions will be answered, and your enjoyment will begin to outweigh your frustration.

I've rapidly become a huge fan of Ken MacLeod's. I much liked his first four novels, which were all linked to each other, somewhat complexly. But it's nice to seem him branching out somewhat with _Cosmonaut Keep_. This book is set in an entirely different future, and instead of AI's, it features several different species of aliens. The author who seems most present as an influence on _Cosmonaut Keep_ is Poul Anderson: there are several direct echoes of Andersonian themes, and one or two passages that seem almost stylistic hommages to Anderson.

Like all of MacLeod's books except his first, it's told in two timelines. After a mysterious prologue, which only makes sense at the end of the book, we are introduced to Gregor Cairns, a student on the planet Mingulay, and his fellow researchers Elizabeth Harkness and Salasso. Salasso is a saur: an intelligent dinosaur-like being. Elizabeth and Gregor are of different social classes: Elizabeth, it seems, is a "native", while Gregor is a descendant of the "cosmonauts", who arrived at Mingulay some centuries earlier from Earth, in a starship which is now unusable. Soon another starship arrives: this one bearing human traders from Nova Babylonia, traders who in some ways resemble Anderson's Kith (and Heinlein's Traders from _Citizen of the Galaxy_, and Vinge's Qeng Ho), though their starship is actually controlled by aliens called Krakens, who naturally enough are huge entities that live in water. Details about this future interstellar civilization, called the "Second Sphere", are slow to be revealed, and I won't say much here, but they are neat and clever and intriguing details. At any rate, Gregor soon meets a beautiful trader girl and falls in love: but all this is complicated by various personal issues, including the "Great Work" of Gregor's family, and the question of what the traders really want.

The other timeline follows a Scotsman named Matt back in the middle of the 21st century. He's a manager of programmers: the actual programmers are either AI's or aging geeks who remember legacy code like DOS and Unix. He's got a thing for an American named Jadey who is involved with the Resistance movement in England: and before long she's giving him a disk with some very interesting information on it. At the same time, an announcement stuns the world: the (Communist) European Union has been contacted by aliens in an asteroid they've been studying. Soon Jadey is under arrest, and Matt is fleeing to Area 51, then to the asteroid, where they learn that the information Jadey had Matt smuggle out is plans for a spaceship and a space drive. All this is highly destabilizing to the world political situation, which teeters on the brink of chaos while the scientists on the asteroid try to talk to the aliens and build the spaceship. It's easy to see where this is going, given that it has to mesh with the other story, but it's still clever and suspenseful.

This is a very good novel, one of the best I've read in 2000. It's got a nice, well-contained story, involving mainly Gregor and Matt's personal lives mixed with the Great Work (for Gregor) and with Matt's obvious destiny. At the same time this story is clearly a setup for potentially fascinating future books in its series. (The title page says this is Book One of Engines of Light.) It's full of nifty SFnal ideas. Behind the scenes, just barely hinted at, are some really scary implications, and some really well-done half-evocations of deep time. MacLeod's prose continues to improve: he has a habit of mostly just writing sound, clever, workable stuff, then every so often winding up to an emotional and even quasi-poetic peak. The characters are decently drawn, though not especially deep, and there is a certain sense that their romantic lives are resolved rather conveniently. (Which isn't to say necessarily happily.) Mostly, this is just good solid Science Fiction, with plenty of sense of wonder inducing ideas.

I enjoyed Cosmonaut Keep, the predecessor to this book, and I thought the ideas presented to be provocative and engrossing. Dark Light, however, adds very little to the previous story. Yes, the same characters exist in the book (although Gregor and Elizabeth have merely bit parts), and it's in the same universe, but the story is droll and not-at-all sci-fi.

If you're interested in how socialism works or the benefits of different styles of democracy, read this book. If you are looking for characters confused by their gender identity (are you a man or a woman? It depends on your actions), you may like this book. If you want interesting SCI FI, however, steer clear.

I found myself actually skimming paragraphs and daydreaming through far-too-long treatises on formation of political parties, all the while waiting for something interesting to happen. There is a very small payoff that continues the story when they visit "the gods", but it is a paltry fraction of the book's text. I don't know if the next book will deliver a more interesting, but I won't be rushing out to buy it. Disappointing.

A group of ancient cosmonauts from Earth itself squabble amongst themselves and with multiple sapient races on a planet ten thousand light years from Earth. Obscure debates about the virtues of anarchy and socialism and whether a republican form of government is a step away from true democracy seem to interest them almost as much as the true meaning of the 'gods' among the asteroid belts.

Yet the gods are real--if not truly gods. They pursue their own motives and bicker amongst themselves, even as the humans squable on the planet below. They rain gifts on some, but Matt and his fellow cosmonauts wonder whether those gifts have strings attached--strings that may involve yanking occasional light-speed ships into far-distant wars. And suddenly the type of government on this obscure planet matters a great deal. Because if the gods can send humans on a far journey to war on other species, they could also send another species to war on the humans.

Author Ken Macleod has created an interesting world with a seemingly stable coexistence between multiple sapient species and between stone age and early industrial human societies. The space-travelling families who visit worlds once every couple of centuries provide a destablizing yet progress-rich catalyst to the planet dwellers below. Fans of political fiction may enjoy Macleod's concern for the battles between socialist causes. I suspect, however, that many U.S. readers, at least, will find this portion of the novel to be slow going without any unexpected insights.

Those who have read COSMONAUT KEEP should find this a worthwhile continuation. I liked it better than the first book, myself, because of the increased political and theological speculation.

Especially fascinating is MacLeod's concept of the Gods and their relationship with humanity. Not highly recommended to extreme conservative religionists.

I did find myself mired down a couple of times in the political dissertations. However, MacLeod basically tells a good story. How good a story it is depends, I suppose, on the concluding book in the series. But these first two are interesting enough and I'm getting to better like the characters, and so I will be reading the final installment.

The Cassini Division "doesnt" read like Iain M Banks or Vernor Vinge despite what a few [...] reviewers have claimed. Banks creates exotic locations/charactes better - while Vinge has no trouble mapping out scope and a "sense of wonder." This book seemed more like a "bad" novel from Stephen Baxer or Charles Sheffield - authors who "can" write brilliantly at times.

So why did I bother with this book knowing that it has recieved poor reviews? If you read the back cover, the premise for the novel is actually quite interesting. A soldier and leader of the Cassini Division has to stop God-Like beings who disintegrated Ganymede. These beings punched a wormhole into Jovian space and are bombarding the inner solar system with powerfull data viruses.

While some of the science and technical parts of the Cassini Division are interesting, the details were always glossed over. And it takes a good 100 pages before the science is really mentioned anyway.

Ken Macleod doesnt put much emphasis on the military aspect of the lead character - Ellen May Ngewthu. All she really does throughout the novel is converse with other characters about how humanity "must" commit mass genocide against the superior beings. Now I have no problems with the "morality" issue that some reviewers complained about, but it is here, that the Cassini Division failed to impress me. The characters act and talk as if they are telling the "reader" about ethics and the implications of genocide. It makes for some very childish dialog throughout the later pages of the book.

PRO: The Concepts are interesting. And the political backdrop for the novel has above average depth - C. J. Cherryh, Jack Vance, and Lois McMaster Bujold are still better at politics and sociology however.

CON: The Concepts are not given the attention they need. The book starts slow and doest pick up till after 100 pages into it. The character dialog is horrible. The interaction with the Jovians lacks imagination. And the Cassini Division has a very predictable ending.

RECOMENDATION: Skip this book and "maybe" look for it at the library.

This was a fast read; I rated it above average not because of MacLeod's somewhat fractured and mediocre writing style, but because of the interesting ideas in the story. The author does manage to introduce some very subtle twists.

This book is not a "shoot-'em-up". There is a lot of talking, a lot of arguments, introducing different idiological points of view.

It was a refreshing twist to have the heroine as a defender of the Solar Union's social anarchy, which somehow achieves the ideal of everyone just getting along and contributing to society. As the book unfolds, your assumptions about the heroine and her beliefs are gradually challenged and altered. At some points you pause to wonder who is the bad guy. By the end you have been exposed to the merits of three dramatically different points of view; the darwinist social anarchists, the materialistic capitalist, and the inexplicable post-human Jovians.

Even weeks after reading it I still am thinking about some of the arguements in the book, which is probably the best anyone could say about a novel.

All the comparisons are accurate. "The Cassini Division" has a little bit of everything -- fast action, snappy dialogue, evocative descriptions, speculation on the nature of consciousness, and enough trippy political-economic speculation to entertain (or annoy) Vernor Vinge and Iain Banks fans. MacLeod's ruthless but amiable characters are as fun and crazy as Bruce Sterling's, but they're deeper thinkers; I'm not sure I buy into their "true knowledge" ideology any more than I buy into Vinge's anarcho-capitalism, but MacLeod makes it at least as plausible -- sure, it's socialism, but as Ellen May Ngwethu points out, it's socialism based on a very pessimistic view of human nature. (This is not your grandmother's Marxism.) But "The Cassini Divison" isn't really about politics, it's about people, technology, and cool stuff -- what hard SF is all about. I'm glad I've just moved to England so I don't have to wait for the rest of his books to be published in the States (which they will be -- count on it).

Of the four books of the Macleodian future, the Sky Road is the weakest. Like the Stone Canal, this book is split in two time periods, past and present. However, in this one, the "present" was dull. It simply lacked any thrill that kept you reading. Worse, I had a hard tim placing it until late in the book when I concluded that it was the 22nd century. Only the "past" storyline was intersting. However, it was a wonderful portrayal of the global disintegration of the 21st century. Lovers of the Macleod's books will find this one worth it if only to watch his depiction of a global dark age setting in.

The only problem was the ending is entirely new. Its results are never mentioned in the Cassini Divsion. And in the "present" story, there is no mention of the Sheenosovs or any of the other things that seemed to have happened in the Cassini Division. This left me wondering if the Sky Road was in fact an Alternate History to Macleod's Future History. Half of it was wonderful, the other half left me confused.

This is another excellent, engaging, novel from a fairly new Scottish writer, just now making his mark in the United States. This probably does not quite jar my favorite of his novels, The Stone Canal (1996), from its position at the top of my personal MacLeod heap, but it's very fine, with yet another differently organized somewhat anarchic semi-utopia on display, as well as yet another look at the turbulent 21st century, and the menace of Artificial Intelligence.

Ken MacLeod's new book is an intriguing offshoot from his previous three novels. (It is not necessary to have read those books to appreciate The Sky Road.) In this future, the world has fractured into numerous smaller states by the early 21st Century, essentially in a continuation of the process begun in the ex-communist states in the 1980s. In addition, Artificial Intelligences begin to emerge, not always planned, and not always benevolent. The three books, in addition to the persistent worry about AI's, portray a variety of political organizations, and forms of organization, most notably perhaps the anarcho-socialist society of the Solar System and the anarcho-capitalist society of New Mars, in the time of The Cassini Division.

The Sky Road is kind of an "alternate history" of MacLeod's future. The earlier parts, chronologically, of The Stone Canal, and all of The Star Fraction, are set in a common past to both The Sky Road and to The Cassini Division, but one of the events in The Stone Canal goes a different way in The Sky Road. Like The Stone Canal (and, to a lesser extent, The Cassini Division), this book is told in two threads, one in the past, in 2059, and the other some centuries in the future. The pastward thread follows Myra Godwin-Davidova, a minor character in The Stone Canal. Myra, 105 years old, is the head of the government of a mini-state near Kazakhstan, called the International Scientific and Technical Worker's Republic. At the opening of the action, the Sino-Soviet Alliance, or the Sheenisov, is advancing on Kazakhstan. Both the reformed UN and Dave Reid's Mutual Protection Society are trying to take control of the world, partly from space, and to stop the Sheenisov. Myra goes on a whirlwind tour of Kazakhstan, Turkey, the US and the UK, looking for military assistance. What she has to offer are the world's remaining supply of nuclear weapons. But her problem is, it's not at all clear who the real enemy is, or for that matter how many enemies there are. She also deals with her personal problems: her age, her guilt over such betrayals of her past ideals as the use of slave labour, and the selling of nuclear protection, and her loss of yet another loved one in suspicious circumstances.

The other thread features Clovis colha Gree, a young student in an odd, somewhat Utopian, Scotland. He is working on a project building a spaceship: the first spaceship to be built since the mysterious "Deliverance". It seems that since this "Deliverance" the world has reorganized itself on a rather pastoral model. Clovis' field of study is history, particularly the life of the "Deliverer". (The reader figures out right quick that the "Deliverer" is Myra Godwin-Davidova.) Clovis meets a beautiful woman called Merrial, and they fall tumultuously in love. But Merrial is a tinker, and the tinkers are regarded with suspicion by the rest of society, as they are the only people who deal with the somewhat restricted computer technology available in this future. Clovis is drawn by his love for Merrial and his thirst for knowledge about the Deliverer to a questionable search for secret files of the Deliverer's: ostensibly to help protect the spaceship project. But this search leads them not only to some anti-hagiographic knowledge about the Deliverer (her use of nuclear weapons, for example), but also to some potential use of the "black logic", the "path of power".

The two threads converge to reveal to the reader some, at least, of what's going on: what the Deliverance really was, and what "black logic" might be, and part of the nature of this future society. It's intriguing, and clever, and by the end quite moving. The only weakness is that I found Merrial and Clovis' affair just a bit convenient: not all that easy to believe. (To explain exactly why would involve spoilers.) I also found the political machinations of Myra's time hard to follow, but that weakness is in me, partly, and partly, I think, its a feature: MacLeod 21st century really is a chaotic time. I also was impressed again by MacLeod's clever way with a phrase. His prose is sound, but only some of the time does it sing. (The first chapter is quite impressive in this way, but he doesn't really maintain that peak level.) However, throughout there are dry asides, and clever plays on words, and mordant observations that hit home.

Ken MacLeod continues to be one of the most exciting new SF writers. His books are politically intriguing, and honest, also full of nice SFnal speculation about future technology, nicely written, and fast moving. The characters are well-drawn, and almost always ambiguous. Each of his books is worth reading, and The Sky Road is one of his best.

The combination of radical politics, space opera and cyber-driven fiction has propelled Ken Macleod's anracho-socialist/capitalist future-world to the top of my list of Preferred Universes to live in. Macleod's intricate construction of a possible future has enthralled and enlightened me... and it is with pleasure that I can say The Sky Road is not only the best book of the four, it seamlessly integrates both a comprehensible and fascinating story/universe of its own with a concluding coda to the series that answers many (not all) of the plotlines from the Dark Period of the saga.

Ok, that's all well and good, but PLEASE: do yourself a favor and just read a copy of this or any other Ken Macleod book you can get your hands on. Both The Cassini Division and The Stone Canal are availbale still here on amazon, and the first book can be bought from the UK iteration of the same.

After all, does anything beat really well-conceived and written speculative fiction?

The book reads like an afterthought rather than a culmination to an interesting trilogy. The plot seems more designed to finish the series than to build to a satisfactory climax and the last chapters bring in a deus ex machina that makes little sense. One gets the impression that Macleod became tired of the series.

This concluding novel in the Engines Of Light series just doesn't quite stand on it's own meriets, but should be read as the last part of the series.

This is definitely "hard" science-fiction, and therefore slow reading at times. But the concepts here are fascinating as such themes as flying saucers and alien abductions are woven together with the intermingling of life forms in a future interplanetary society. Quite highly recommended.

_Engine City_ concludes Ken MacLeod's second novel series, together called Engines of Light. In the first two novels (_Cosmonaut Keep_ and _Dark Light_) we learned that an asteroid passing near Earth in the mid-21st Century contained intelligent nano-bacteria, who collectively had the intelligence of a god. These beings made available to an international team of cosmonauts a starship, which they took hundreds of thousands of light years to a planet called Mingulay. There they learned that they were only the latest of many waves of colonization of that area of the galaxy, apparently all at the doing of the gods. This "second sphere" was inhabited by humans from ancient Babylon, for example, and by humans from more recent historical eras, and by intelligent dinosaurs, and by other hominids such as pithkies (Australopithecus). Travel in the Second Sphere is dominated by starships run by intelligent giant squid (the Krakens) and by the saurs, but the new Cosmonauts have a starship, if they can only figure out how to navigate it. In the second book, having learned to navigate the Bright Star, they travel to nearby Croatan (home of the lost Roanoke colony), and there the politically active, long-lived, cosmonauts naughtily foment a rebellion, while also contacting the local gods, and learning some scary secrets about the gods, and about other 8-legged aliens.

In _Engine City_ MacLeod works diligently to knit together the various threads of the first two books. In fact, at times the book seems too busy, too full of new ideas only a few of which would have sufficed for a full novel. By the end, however, he does draw things to a fairly satisfying conclusion (only to blow it up again in a clever SF-referential last chapter -- not, though, a harbinger of further books in the series but rather something of a wink (or perhaps grimace) at the reader).

At any rate _Engine City_ involves the Bright Star and other new starships establishing a new trading culture, threatening the established hegemony of the kraken-controlled ships of Nova Babylonia. One of the most cynical of the old cosmonauts makes his way to Nova Babylonia to foment a new rebellion, on essentially Stalinist terms. The sinister 8-legged aliens turn up, offering immortality, but at what cost? The gods are provoked. A terrible war is threatened. In general, pretty neat stuff, but I felt the book was a bit rushed, and a bit too packed. I'd rather have focussed more on some of the individual characters. Still, MacLeod has definitely met his obligations to the series reader by answering all the questions he earlier raised.

Not a great book but a good one. I continue to eagerly buy MacLeod's new books as they appear.