Newton's Wake

by Ken MacLeod

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

In the aftermath of the Hard Rapture-a cataclysmic war sparked by the explosive evolution of Earth's artificial intelligences into godlike beings-a few remnants of humanity managed to survive. Some even prospered.

Lucinda Carlyle, head of an ambitious clan of galactic entrepreneurs, had carved out a profitable niche for herself and her kin by taking control of the Skein, a chain of interstellar gates left behind by the posthumans. But on a world called Eurydice, a remote planet at the farthest rim of the galaxy, Lucinda stumbled upon a forgotten relic of the past that could threaten the Carlyles' way of life.

For, in the last instants before the war, a desperate band of scientists had scanned billions of human personalities into digital storage, and sent them into space in the hope of one day resurrecting them to the flesh. Now, armed, dangerous, and very much alive, these revenants have triggered a fateful confrontation that could shatter the balance of power, and even change the nature of reality itself.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Singularity, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Space

352 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 1, 2004

About the author

Ken MacLeod is an award-winning Scottish science fiction writer.

His novels have won the Prometheus Award and the BSFA award, and been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He lives near Edinburgh, Scotland.

MacLeod graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics.

His novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism.

Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection.

Reviews

[Kara Babcock · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am so confused. It was all going well until the last few chapters, and then the story metamorphosed into a bizarre garden of shards of reality, and I lost the plot entirely.

Singularity and post-Singularity fiction does not seem to be my friend these days! In Newton’s Wake, the Singularity—which Ken MacLeod refers to as “the Hard Rapture” here—happens, and a vast percentage of the Earth’s population are involuntarily uploaded to machines. The AIs bootstrap themselves into faster-than-light starships and leave the Earth behind. Fast-forward a few centuries, and the survivors have picked themselves up by their bootstraps. They have reverse-engineered FTL, and some of them have even started to monopolize the network of planet-bound wormholes (“planetgates” perhaps?) for commercial advantage. Every so often, they come across the remnants of their posthuman cousins—incredibly dangerous machines that seem to enjoy eliminating ordinary humans (I assume because we smell bad and have terrible taste in television)—and all hell breaks loose.

It was all going so well until the ending. The barrier to entry is very low. We start with Lucinda Carlyle, a headstrong young woman in the clan of Carlyles who control the planetgates (I’m making it a thing, OK?). She takes a “combat archaeology” team to a hitherto unexplored planet, only to discover it’s got a hitherto unknown human settlement. And yes, posthuman war machines.

So Lucinda inadvertently causes a conflict of interstellar proportions, which I think is a pretty neat way for our protagonist to screw things up. And it promises to make for an exhilarating adventure. Indeed, things really pick up when Lucinda finally leaves Eurydice and finds her way back to her family, who are understandably pissed off by her mistake. She undertakes a suicide mission (literally, she dies and then her memory backup is decanted into a fresh body) to make herself feel better. It doesn’t work, but it does allow MacLeod to provide some very clunky exposition to keep the plot churning on.

Mind uploading is probably the big novum here in Newton’s Wake. It’s what led to the Hard Rapture, and it continues to be a point of contention among the various factions of humanity. Indeed, Eurydicean society is founded based on the schism between the Returners (who wanted to return to Earth and resurrect all the uploaded minds) and Reformers (who basically didn’t). Some factions, like the Carlyles, are all about resurrection. Others, like the Knights of Enlightenment, do not subscribe to that philosophy. The factions aren’t all that impressive. They all have silly names—Knights of Enlightenment, America Offline, and DK (Lucinda doesn’t know what it stands for). They are cardboard-cutout, their representative characters mostly one-dimensional stock characters to help the protagonists on their journey.

In addition to mind uploading, MacLeod includes some subtler ideas if you are willing to pay attention. For instance, Lucinda constantly references the Chronology Protection Conjecture as justification for FTL and planetgate travel. MacLeod speculates on the possibility that sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence can install itself at the quantum level, essentially controlling the universe as “quantum angels”. At this point, we’re getting into the fantasy side of posthuman fiction—but it’s still ridiculously cool.

I kind of which MacLeod had explored some of the consequences of the Hard Rapture more thoroughly instead of making the war machines into faceless, killer robot antagonists. This, combined with the relative shallowness of the antagonists, makes for a very unfulfilling conflict. Similarly, though the identity crisis that is part-and-parcel of mind uploading and resurrection gets mentioned, MacLeod never really expands on it, despite Lucinda dying and coming back for the first time.

Prior to reading it, I was suspicious of how thin Newton’s Wake was. Was it really possible to have a post-Singularity story in slightly more than 300 pages? Indeed it is, but it isn’t necessarily a good one.

Still, until the last few chapters, I was willing to give this a solid three stars. The inscrutability of those chapters soured me on the entire book. I can be a careful reader when I want to be, and I still don’t understand what happened—who was where, on what side, or for what reason. From the moment that Kevin drags Lucinda out of meeting on Eurydice, I am completely lost. I seldom feel like this, and when I do, it’s usually in an abstruse work of ego-stroking disguised as postmodern literary fiction.

What bothers me the most is that, because I don’t understand what happens at the end, I don’t understand how Lucinda has changed. Obviously she has become wiser. But exactly who is she working with and what is she working towards now? What was the point of the events at the end of the book? Newton’s Wake robs me of the closure every reader deserves upon reaching the very last page. And that, regardless of how intrigued I was at the beginning, is something I cannot abide.

[Dirk Grobbelaar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Resurrections had to be sponsored. It was a big responsibility, bringing people back from the dead. This was one reason why it wasn’t done very much.

A novel with some nifty ideas, but which did not quite generate a corresponding level of excitement.
I suppose it has to do with what rings your bell. In my case I can only speculate. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I didn’t get super-excited about all the cultural and social quirks of the Eurydiceans, or about all the “Returner” vs “Reformer” politics. I was certainly too damn lazy uninspired to appreciate the comparisons with the current (or at least decade-or-so ago) real world politics. Perhaps I had an unrealistic expectation (War Machines, eh?).

All the wild talk of FTL starships and wormhole gates had suggested that Einsteinian physics had been in some respects superseded, but seeing the backwash lapping at Newton’s feet was as unexpected and unsettling as it should have been, in retrospect, predictable.

Despite not having extreme highs and lows (or peaks and valleys, if you prefer), there are elements about the story that I did enjoy. The tech, for one thing, was often quite cool. Like I already mentioned, there are some nifty ideas here. Thing is, this novel isn’t really about ideas; it has a bit more of a philosophical and political agenda, which is the dividing factor here. If you like the latter, you will likely enjoy this book. I usually do, but this time, frankly, I just wasn’t in the mood.

As you may, by this point in the review, have surmised: I don’t really have a lot to say about Newton’s Wake. And therein lies the rub. It wasn’t particularly shite. It wasn’t particularly awesome. It was perfectly just-so, as far as my personal reading experience was concerned.

Score? Well, I’m thinking 2.5 is exactly half of 5, but goodreads doesn’t allow for 2.5 so what now? Since there is a good possibility I am the ignorant pleb here, I’ll err on the side of caution and round up.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

My 2004 review-notes, from when the book was new:
"A": MacLeod's best yet -- gripping far-future space-opera, all the good KenMac stuff with hardly any of the bad. The only serious fault is a murky ending. Don't miss!

I don't have much to add to a bunch of rave reviews, here and elsewhere. Forex, "It was the small hours of the morning before I closed this book, which is probably the highest praise I can give a novel. I could babble on for a bit about how well written it is, how inventive, but really, all you need to know is that this is probably the best book MacLeod has written in years." -- David Kennedy,
http://www.dkennedy.org/C2025243227/E...

"He's kicking up his heels and having a high old time with this one, bringing in loads of satire to give this transhumanist adventure yarn a whimsical edge we haven't quite seen from him before." -- TM Wagner, http://www.sfreviews.net/newtonswake....

"Newton's Wake is without a doubt Ken MacLeod's finest work to date. It has all the depth, substance and action of his previous novels, while displaying a new level of maturity and artistic growth." -- Adam Volk, http://www.sfsite.com/09b/nw184.htm

Held up well to re-reading in 2008, except for the dodgy ending.

[Phil · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I am a fan of MacLeod's work (his Corporation Wars books were super), NW was a bit of a let down. In fact, it read a lot like a Charles Stross novel on the idea front (MacLeod thanks Stross in the acknowledgements), especially regarding the 'singularity' and post-humans. In NW, the 'singularity' or 'rapture' as it is called here by the survivors, essentially destroyed earth as military A.I.s first waged war between the USA and Europe and then absconded to where ever posthumans go, leaving behind the dross of a high-tech society and an infested Earth.

We quickly learn of three human societies that now dominate the remains of human civilization a few hundred years after the rapture; all of which pulled themselves out of the ruins to create new societies. First we have the Americans, largely Mormon farmers, that seek out new planets to colonize and farm via newly rediscovered/reverse engineered FTL tech. Secondly, we have the remains of the 'communist' bloc, largely Korean, who are still trying to build a communist society in the stars. Finally, we have the surviving Asian/East Asian bloc who are wary of the post-human tech still lying around. Besides the power blocs, we have the Carlyles, a scrappy group of Scots who went from being basically a mafia to controlling the worm-holes that connect various planets, doing 'business'.

Our main protagonist, Lucinda Carlyle, starts off the novel investigating a new door in the worm-hole, emerging on a planet and finding a crystal monolith over 1KM tall. Upon entering the monolith, she inadvertently woke up some 'war machines'; this in turn drew the attention of the humans already on the planet, who quickly arrived at the scene and wiped the Carlyles out, except for Lucinda. The new planet has actually been settled for a few hundred years, populated by 'runners' from the original conflict on Earth. It seems they escaped after uploading themselves to a computer and the ship brought them to this planet; until contact with the Carlyles, they thought they were the only human survivors.

Like much of MacLeod's work, there is a lot of snarky dialogue and this comes close to being a satire as well. Yes, there were some fun lines in this regard, but my patience for science fiction humor grew a little thin as the novel progressed.

This is a relatively short book, only 350 pages or so, and frankly I thought MacLeod tried to do a little too much here and ended up not doing any of the story arcs justice, at least not enough to make them satisfying. One theme/arc concerned the resurrections of the people involved; with a 'back up', a new you could be produced in a week or so, although not all the power blocs embraced this tech. So, we have some speculations on life and post-life, etc. We have people/characters who actually lived through the rapture, for example, and some who were 'returned' from partial memory constructs. Are the latter 'real' people?

The main plot of the book comprises the second arc and concerned the power struggle over the new planet, with all the major human blocs getting involved. This resolved itself about 50 pages before the end and then we returned to the first arc mentioned, as there is an attempt to 'restore' others who were caught up in the rapture. Not sure this was necessary and it sure made the ending messy. This would have been better if MacLeod stuck with the satire of the three blocs struggling over the new planet; trying to add a somewhat metaphysical aspect on the meaning of life and death felt a little tacked on and out of place.

Overall, a decent read, but not one of his best. Maybe he needs a different person to toss ideas around with than Stross. 2.5 stars, rounding down for the unsatisfying ending.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not only is Newton's Wake: A Space Opera bad, it is positively obnoxious. The story is breathtakingly unoriginal and its technology is farcical. When need comes to resurrect two folk singers whose personalities have long since been digitized, the process is thus: (1) dump "two heavy paper sacks labelled 'Human (dry)—Sterile if Sealed,'" into a tank; (2) add water. I shit you not.

Need I say more? But I will. Several of the characters speak in a thick Glaswegian brogue that, when rendered in print by Mr. MacLeod, is nearly impenetrable. Reading these sections of dialogue is like crossing a brier patch, stumbling with every second step. Had this stylistic affectation been more ably executed, it might have done more to flesh out these otherwise paper-thin characters. As it is, it is simply a pain in the ass for the reader.

[Elentarri]

Some random person on the internet mentioned that this novel had combat archaeologists.  Sounded exciting and different, so I got the book.

I only managed to read a third of this novel before deciding that I simply was not interested - in either the one dimensional, uninteresting characters; the confusing, disjointed and unengaging narrative; the gibberish technobabble; and the spelled out Glaswegian accent making the dialogue a chore to decipher and this reader wanting to get the red pen out to fix all the spelling mistakes.  Also, in the third of the novel I read, the "combat archaeologist" does no archaeology and might as well be labelled an adventurer, lackey, diplomat or anything else, but archaeologist.  Disappointing.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Space opera tale of a universe where human society was almost wiped out by machines it created. In the aftermath, there are several groups vying for control and several bear tongue in cheek names to organizations we would recognize.

Apparently, when the machines had almost destroyed Earth, some human chose to stay and fight and the others, believed to be cowards, fled to another galaxy.

Wormholes, which are sort of like short cut tunnels or teleportation, discover these cowards who have created their own society.

Tension rises when all the vying groups find out there is a technology on this planet which would tip the scales in favor of whoever controls it.

A fair read but disjointed at times. Some character motivations are lacking and even though there are some really cool ideas in this tale, they aren't fully mined.

OVERALL GRADE: B to B plus.

[Bee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok, so I really tried. I finished it this morning and I still don't know if i enjoyed it or if I would recommend it to anyone. He's a good writer, with a brilliant imagination. I enjoyed the tech, the world is different to anything I've encountered... but I think it stresses the idea of a space 'opera' too much, it read like a bloody opera. Just too much drama, and too much random unconnected events.

But I'll give MacLeod another chance before finalizing my opinion.

[Tomislav · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Singularity became a popular setting concept in science fiction in the 1990s, pioneered by such writers as Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, and Ken MacLeod. In case you are not familiar, it posits that at some point in human technological development, artificial intelligence takes off, following an exponential path and exceeding its biological origins. It is often accompanied by the transformation of humans into posthuman form, through synthesis with AI, biological uplift, upload or download. In his 1998 novel The Cassini Division, Ken MacLeod referred to it as “the Rapture for nerds.” Since that time, the concept has become endemic throughout space opera.

Newton’s Wake is a stand-alone novel, set post-singularity. In its future history, the technological singularity began in North America and rapidly spread militarily across the Earth. Some humans fled the Solar System, carrying within their society a conflict between “runners” and “returners.” The Returners aspire to return to Earth to liberate the millions of humans whose personalities were swept up as they died, and became integrated into the singularity. Meanwhile, on Earth, the artificial intelligence eventually achieved a Hard Rapture, and is no longer omnipresent. Several human populations on Earth survived, and eventually developed into their own spacefaring societies – AO (America Offline, from American backcountry, now farmers and terraformers) – KE (Knights of Enlightenment, from Pacific Rim technologists, now a high technology religious sect) – DK (acronym uncertain, from North Korea, now extreme communist partisans).

The lead character is Lucinda Carlyle, a young member of the independent Scottish family syndicate that controls access to the “skein” of scarce instantaneous transport gates discovered throughout the galactic arm in which humans now live. The three human societies “fittle” with their FTL space fleets, when not willing to pay the Carlyles. At the novel’s start, Lucinda leads a small group to open the newly discovered far-flung human world of Eurydice, and awakens an artifact that threatens to re-awaken the singularity itself.

The plot is convoluted with rapid reversals, and shifting alliances between representatives of the human groups and the artificial intelligences. It takes some close reading to keep track of it all. It also takes some close reading to make sense of Lucinda’s Scottish accent. A weakness in the writing is character motivation, as people re-group emotionlessly - one day fighting, the next having polite conversation. The strength is in the complexity of the social and technical milieu, and in the clever commentary it makes on our own times. Deep character development is really not the point. I enjoyed the read, but I think readers not well-versed in the consensus concepts of contemporary science fiction genre writing may feel lost.

[Whisper19 · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5
a fun read with some cool concepts. I need to think a bit more about it.

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a novel I wanted to like much more than I ultimately did.

I like Ken MacLeod's other novels very much. The Fall Revolution series was excellent; I taught one of the books at the end of my British novels seminar. These are richly imagined tales with intricate plots and challenging world-building, combining deep knowledge of left politics with science. I didn't appreciate some of his later titles as much, but liked that way they handled blogging (Learning The World, The Execution Channel). I also picked Newton's Wake because I was looking for space opera.

Well.

There is some good stuff in here. The basic plot is fun. Four centuries from now humanity has spread across the stars, picking over remnants of a massive singularity which raptured away a chunk of civilization and wrecked a lot more. The protagonist is a Carlyle, a Scots crime family that now controls a wormhole network. They are opposed by several other post-singularity entities, each with a distinct ideology, aesthetic, and set of goals. They tangle on Eurydice, a planet with an unusual colony and stranger artifact. One faction is religiously minded because they claim to have proven the cyclical universe theory (109). So: good world-building and stage-setting.

Newton's Wake is also very playful. Faster than light traveling (FTL) becomes "fittling". A future copyright enforcement agency is "popularly known as the Mouse" (50) (a Disney joke). One character creates showy operas often based on fantastic misreadings of 20th-century history, most notably an epic tragedy about Leonid Brezhnev, Prince of Muscovy (122ff), and "The gunfight between the Bushes and the Bn-Ladens in West Side Story" (55). There are also cute references to other sf, including writers like Moorcock and Wells.

The novel begins strong with a burst of action, our protagonist screwing up, and a spate of decent exposition. Mid-way through, though, things weaken. Two new characters appear, resurrected Scots folksingers, and they don't add much to the story (even the author seems uninterested, overusing the same words to describe them, as Caulder repeatedly leers). Our heroine does stuff, but remains the same person. The plot returns to life in some spectacular battles, but flares out without resolution. And the finale, well, does very little and doesn't much much sense.

I kept losing focus during the book's second half, a reaction I haven't had with Macleod's earlier works. I finished, but wasn't happy to do so.

Now I'm going to reread some of his blog posts to feel better.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book presents an some interesting ideas, but the author has a long way to go to make truly wonderful science fiction. The potential is there.

The story doesn't really seem to start until about halfway through the book. The beginning section provides some information about the world of the book, but it does not provide anything to the story or the characters. It is often muddy, dragging, and really doesn't have a direction.

There is also a story line about singers that seems forced into the book that really doesn't do much for the main plot. It seems to be an idea taken from Hyperion with the poet Keats and badly executed.

In the last 20-25% of the book to the ending it becomes just baffling. The author rains such a rapid fire technobabble that makes one wonders what actually happened, or if the author understands what the words mean.

The ideas and the world had potential. It seems like the author is very inexperienced and had a bold idea to force a space opera from disconnected ideas. The only way he succeeded in doing so is to make the book the same length as many of the better novels.

Just a little addition, the person who writes the book blurb probably should have some familiarity with the book. The main character is not the head of the clan, and had not carved out a niche for her clan, it was her first time leading an exploration mission after they already had control of it. Not a huge mistake, but a very amateurish mistake.

[Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was surprised to read a number of negative reviews of this book... very surprised. This is good, classic, entertaining Space Opera with a twist.
We are in a future, post-apocalyptic, Universe. The machines became sentient aka "Terminator" and things just became more interesting (as in the Chinese saying) as a result. Humanity has divided into a number of specialised "clans" and we are asked to join the Carlyles (who control the skein, or interweaving wormhole, which makes travel interesting - not always as in the Chinese saying) in their mission to Eurydice, a mission that goes tits up (to use an appropriate pre-apocalyptic expression). The incident sets into motion a chain of events that are, at times, amusing and quite exciting - as long as you've been backed up!
This is a super story. MacLeod takes no prisoners and has no sympathy. He throws us right in there leaving it up to us to absorb and understand what's going on. Intelligent stuff and the marrow of all good SF!

[Lewis Sellers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminded me a bit of Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon The Deep_. (A favorite of mine.) For the most part enjoyed the first 80% of the novel. After that though it became unclear what was going on, and more especially _Why_. We are left with soft, dream-like imagery with no real conflicts to speak of. Along that line, the conflict we should be speaking of, the one the novel sets up pieces and relationships for, builds up for most of the work, passes by quickly once it happens, almost a non-event (aside from basically startling a few people briefly). Many opportunities for emotional climaxes or meaty plot resolutions simply never materialize. So it was both enjoyable and frustrating at the same time.

[Philip Dickinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story starts well but spirals into a chaos made of it's own cleverness. It's the science fiction equivalent of a man-drawer...full of curious ideas and interesting bobbins, none of which belong or work together. Ken almost got me to care what happened to Lucinda Carlyle but fell short. I quite like fallible heroes but it's not good when they blunder about ineffectually, not managing to influence their own outcomes positively in the least.

Perhaps the biggest drawback is the proportion of the story that's devoted to social events. Seems a bit unbalanced when there's a cosmos-wide threat developing that needs to be kicked into touch.

[Lightreads · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted some chewy scifi (nothing hard enough to require work, just something a bit toothsome). This got the job done – post singularity wormhole explorers playing in the remnants of godlike AI’s, space communists, mass consciousness uploads, etc. Second cousin to Stargate original flavor with a certain Kage Baker-ish soupcon to the protagonist, the faintest touch of the gigglies, and some deliberately terrible folk music as a bonus. Nothing groundbreaking or particularly new or exciting, but it got the job done.

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. I felt it threw me in at the deep end a bit, as Macleod seems to do a lot, but I loved it.

[Michael Howley · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a sci-fi/classic space opera, this had some interesting ideas with spotty execution. But as a satirical exploration of art and historiography in a post-Earth society, this was a romp. Calling the Entertainment Copyright Control Board "The Mouse" was just tip of the iceberg.

This reminded me a lot of The Hyperion Cantos, but not as carefully orchestrated. I kept feeling like chunks of explanation were missing and that I didn't quite care about certain things as much as the story needed me to. Maybe a little more prologue with some wider discussion of the balance of powers would have helped. Bonus points for using "juche" so much though.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

High concept space opera that loses steam in a big way two-thirds of the way through.

Newton's Wake is one on a flurry of science fiction novels in the 2000s that tried to explore what a post-Singularity universe might look like from the perspective of the left-behinders. MacLeod has written here an intriguing rendition of it - at parts slightly satirical and trope-savvy; at others strikingly optimistic in its outlook on human survival.

But as in may of Macleod's works the tone set from the outset is relatively parochial - by dint of the fact that the protagonist and her merry family of wormhole rentiers are Scottish by descent, tae the point that everythin' that's said by  is spelt in a broad Scottish brogue, which, ye might expect, gets a wee bit unreadable at times.

Said protagonist Lucinda is a scion of the Carlyles, a powerful, Corleone-style family with a strict internal code and loose external morals, who control the network of wormholes that form the fabric of post-Singularity civilization across the galaxy. Said civilization is split into three major blocs (and this is where the satire comes in) - the space Amish America Offline (AO) who are basically a bunch of Luddite pastoralists, Democratic Korea (or Kampuchea), who are basically a combination of every socialist-communist vestige left in the early 21st century (read: mostly North Korea), and the Knights of Enlightenment, Japanese techno-ascetics who eschew the use of rejuvenation technology (yes, people can come back from the dead in this universe, if they so choose).

Anyway, Lucinda Carlyle is on an expedition to investigate a strange alien planet of Eurydice on the other side of a wormhole gate, when she encounters an entire lost human colony - who haven't gone feral or weird or anything, but have in fact established a bustling presence on the planet and are comfortable to the extent that large portions of the novel are about the grandiloquent stage productions of one of their playwrights and a couple of resurrected 21st century singers who find themselves on this brave new world. Said colony is bustling, but the planet is littered with strange post-human artifacts that, ruffled by the Carlyles' arrival, are beginning to stir.

MacLeod has great fun fleshing out this universe in all its too-strange-for-fiction style outlandishness, and for the most part, he does it well. Even small details of this odd hodgepodge of futurity stick in my mind weeks after finishing the book, and the entire edifice drips with self-awareness and an aversion to tired sf tropes. After escaping Eurydice, Lucinda flits from place to place via wormhole, encounters the locals, and hightails out in a bid to return to the family fold so that she can relay the bad news that the control mechanism for the wormhole network is located on the planet. Then there's a strange side-journey into the heart of a mysterious dead world orbiting a neutron star, where a cache of post-human tech is stored, and Lucinda faces death for the first time. It's all very interesting and heady stuff.

But ultimately, after having his fun, Macleod must have thought that there was a need to end the story post-haste, and so, he did. But not well - everything just suddenly shifts in tone, from the laconic, slightly satirical showpiece of post-post-Singularity hijinks to some faux-dramatic and pathos filled ending in a whiplash. All the plot threads that were just chugging along at the outset all get pulled taut and tangled together in myriad places. The end result is a confusing and not-very-compelling tangle that gets bundled up in a too-neat bow at the very end. Just like this review.

I give this: 3.5 out of 5 black sickle harvesting machines

 

 

 

[Jerico · Rating 3 out of 5]

So this is a difficult review to write. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but it has some pretty deep flaws, so a pro/con list is probably the best way to do it.

Pro: The setting. This is a fairly original space opera setting in the sense that is captures most of the traditional points of the sub-genre (interesting factions, FTL, grand battles, larger than life machines, etc) but puts a modern spin on them (injects transhumanism, a surprising degree of intellectual/scientific rigor, less accepting of the inherited tropes). It`s set in a post-Singularity galaxy, with four or five major factions jockeying for influence and control. The factions are great (you have what appears to be a North Korean descended old-school commie space empire, squabbling with America Offline, followers of the prophet Koresh, a Scottish crime syndicate and a Japanese descended Zen/Enlightenment knighthood).

Con: A touch opaque at time. The writing, which is general good, will occasionally whip off in bizarre directions, characters will have massive swings in motivation between dialog breaks, reactions will not line up with stimuli in a smooth manner, etc. It`s smooth and polished writing that will periodically kink up in ways not quite justified by the material.

Pro: Humor. This book has a sort of deadpan, historical irony about it that is black as hell. Much of it pops up in the person of Ben-Ami, a playwright who produces `historical` dramas that bend and twist our history into gallingly funny shapes. One of his works is, for example, Osama:Holy Warrior, which apparently had a dance fight between the titular character and Princess Hillary. They`re a small but persistent bit of the story, but they really add a lot to the book.

Con: The larger plot, especially its pacing. Things swing around a lot, as is to be expected in a space opera, but the previously mentioned opacity in description and characterization detract from the flow of the novel. The novel appears to end with about a hundred pages left to go, which then head into increasingly esoteric 2001 territory, before pulling back from the precipice a bit. It makes the ending seem out of place.

Pro: The characters. Despite their occasionally odd tangents, the characters are interesting, complex and fairly fleshed out. There aren`t villains, in any conventional sense, dialog (once you get used to the Scottish) is crisp and evocative, their personal histories are compelling and well integrated with the setting as a whole, and you get fairly attached to some of them.

and finally,

Pro: The set pieces/battles/predicaments. Much like an Iain Banks book, there are some remarkably interesting situations the characters are tossed into, that make the setting really shine in depth and complexity while revealing new facets of the characters. The heist from the Pulsar system is one of them, the various military engagements, even the scenes of the play rehearsal, all add to the setting and characters while being a great deal of fun in their own right. Unfortunately, MacLeod isn`t quite the prose stylish that Banks is, so they can bog down slightly.

A good, if not great, space opera in the modern mode.

[R.K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Newton's Wake by Ken MacLeod has some good ideas and interesting characters within it's pages but in the end it can't find an ending or a villain to cheer for when the good guys possibly win the day.

Taking place in the future where singularities, faster than light travel and backing yourself up before going out on a dangerous mission the story is quite simple: A group of combat archeologists find a world named Eurydice that was cut off from Earth after a devastating war and bit by bit everyone from Knights of Enlightenment to AOL Off Line to the Korean Republic to intelligent machines show up.

The beginning of it turns out rather well, one of the archeologists, Lucinda Carlyle is captured and separated from the group and is introduced to a culture around her. Turns out her family owns a expanse called the Skien that allows for wormhole travel. Along the way two musicians are raised from the dead at the request for a promoter so he can produce one of his off the wall musicals that from the sound of it could have been a book all by their own. With the news of Earth still existing he sees the flavor of the month.

Somewhere along the way the evil war machines someone should be worried about finally show up and then and....suddenly realized by the time I've gotten three quarters of the way through this book and I did not care.

Maybe a second read will help but the characters get 3 stars, the plot doesn't...

[Tom Leary · Rating 1 out of 5]

I went into this book looking for an engaging Science Fiction story with multiple interesting story lines which touch on one-another and comprise a while story.

I ended up with a somewhat disjointed story that never seemed to find closure. there were a lot of different characters that I found unmemorable and, consequently, hard to differentiate between. There also seemed to be clear visualizations in the authors mind which I couldn't capture in my own.

Most frustrating was the final description of humanity. I had a hard time understanding exactly what had happened, even after a re-read of certain sections, and the closing seemed to be quickly composed. A final coda is included to describe the lives of each of the main characters and explain the current state of humanity, but this still remained elusive to me and I've come away not really understanding, or even wanting to understand, the authors premise.

If the story had been more engaging I could have overlooked the confused closing. I'm also sure there are many other people who would find the story interesting, it simply didn't hold my attention and seemed to push too much against hard science without explaining how things have happened nor how events will end.

[Susanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ended up with only 3 stars because it starts to drag around the half-way mark. I hugely enjoyed the beginning, I liked the concept and the posthuman history - I like having me my post-singularity explained and shown in sprinkled detail.

But once the Lamont plot strand kick in, I'd have wished for a more speedy execution. Everything just seems to take too long - a sign that I'm getting impatient and not being invested enough in the story.

I couldn't bring myself to enjoy the Ben-Ami/Winter/Calder storyline because I thought most of it superfluous. I'm sure the political and socio-cultural situation and the disparity in world view between Euridicans and the rest of the known universe could have been shown in a more concise way, and without song lyrics.

I couldn't connect with Lucinda Carlyle or any of the characters in the entire book, and I felt that the Carlyles didn't have any of the values I associate with being human. Which is what "post-human" means, I suppose. No matter, it's an okay book, and I would definitely recommend it to MacLeod fans.

[Stephen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I found it very difficult to care about the main protagonist or her goals: we're never given any substantial idea of what came in her life before we meet her during the book's inciting incident, so I couldn't get a handle on her, or find her family's greed-based motives particularly appealing or interesting. And I found it hard to follow the thread of events, even outside the realm of the posthuman, so it was a bit of a slog for me. There's some nice ideas here and there though, and some great sections, such as a raid on a fascinating piece of cosmic real estate. It's a pity: based on the description, I thought this book would be right up my alley.

[Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tale of Glaswegian gangsters in space, set in future where Earth has been evacuated and left to the war machines. Now all that's left are a sect of Japanese ninjas, Korean industrial communists and a family of neds from the east-end of Glasgow who control the wormhole gate nexus. Well, at least they did until one of them stumbles upon a whole new world.

I quite liked the story although MacLeod's frequent use of the Glesca dialect did start to get a bit wearing.

[Paige · Rating 1 out of 5]

First, a confession....I didn't finish the book....because I just couldn't make myself do it. I got about half way through the book before I gave up. What I did read, I found alternately confusing (Scottish slang), slightly interesting, and mind-numbingly boring (the rest). I used to think I would read any sci-fi or space opera and like it (at least enough to finish); but this book proved that I was wrong.

[Matti Uusitalo · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a complete waste of time. The execution of this story fails flat disappointingly as the setting and ideas promise more than is delivered. This novel is sci-fi in name only as the sciencey and tech elements remain mostly external to the story. However, as there are some quality moments buried in there I'd not feel completely against trying another novel from the author. Really can't recommend this one though.

[Crusader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slightly disorientating at first due the the unfamiliar universe, technology and dialect used but once things become more familiar it picks up pace. Interesting read with a focus on the aftermath of singularity and effect of post-human cultures.

[Fred · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book had everything a good sci-fi book needs and somehow the author didn’t make it work. The characters were uninspiring and the story all over the place. It’s like the author couldn’t decide were the story was going. Not recommended.

[Scott Munjone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Struggled through this one.
Found it difficult to follow (weather it was my fault or the book's).
Future of mankind where numerous fractions are usually at war.

Favorite line from the book. A play write is talking about his craft and says "I've even read Shakespeare in it's original American"