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The Fall Revolution #3-4
Divisions
Now back in print, this volume comprises The Cassini Division and The Sky Road, the last two books of The Fall Revolution, Ken MacLeod's groundbreaking, multiple award-winning science fiction epic.
The Cassini Division: In the 24th century, post humans, god-like descendents of humans who transformed themselves with high technology, have warped the very fabric of the solar system for unknowable reasons. Ellen May Ngewthu has a plan to rid humanity of these beings, but she must first travel the entirety of the Solar Union, convincing others that post-humans are the threat she knows they are...
The Sky Road: Her rockets redundant, her people rebellious, and her borders defenseless against the Sino-Soviet Union, Myra Godwin appeals to the crumbling West for help as she faces the end of the space age. And, centuries in the future, as humanity again reaches into space, a young scholar could make the difference between success and failure. For his mysterious new lover has seduced him into the idea of extrapolating the ship's future from the dark archives of the past.
The Sky Road won the British Science Fiction Association Award.
The Fall Revolution Series:
1. The Star Fraction
2. The Stone Canal
3. The Cassini Division
4. The Sky Road
The Cassini Division: In the 24th century, post humans, god-like descendents of humans who transformed themselves with high technology, have warped the very fabric of the solar system for unknowable reasons. Ellen May Ngewthu has a plan to rid humanity of these beings, but she must first travel the entirety of the Solar Union, convincing others that post-humans are the threat she knows they are...
The Sky Road: Her rockets redundant, her people rebellious, and her borders defenseless against the Sino-Soviet Union, Myra Godwin appeals to the crumbling West for help as she faces the end of the space age. And, centuries in the future, as humanity again reaches into space, a young scholar could make the difference between success and failure. For his mysterious new lover has seduced him into the idea of extrapolating the ship's future from the dark archives of the past.
The Sky Road won the British Science Fiction Association Award.
The Fall Revolution Series:
1. The Star Fraction
2. The Stone Canal
3. The Cassini Division
4. The Sky Road
496 pages, Paperback
First published May 26, 2009
7 people are currently reading
145 people want to read
About the author
Ken MacLeod
113 books767 followersKen 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 22, 2014
An intelligent,sprawling post-modern space opera over four volumes riffing on themes of consciousness, its definition and its potential evolution and disintegration and variations thereof,including the impact of consciousness on historical development. If this doesn't sound like fun, think about 'the basic molecular longing of enzyme for substrate...carbon for oxygen. The lust of dust.' p 57 and the dangerously beautiful possibilities of alien intelligences. And for those who prefer their romance to be of epic scale, here are loves that surpass space, time, and rigid species categorization.
KM doesn't take sides. He delves into his alternate realities and proves capable of inhabiting multitudinous points of view. Unafraid to pose the big questions that are usually obscured by moralistic and ethical blindness, he plays with ideas by stringing them out to their logical surprising conclusions. "What if capitalism is unstable and socialism is impossible?" p16 he wonders in the introduction.
"This was the evil, this was the threat. The proliferating constructions of supposedly human devising, the corporate state systems, which always turned out to be inimical to human interests but always found a good reason to grow further." p59
"The trouble with our wonderful society is that it constantly leaves people behind...turns masses of people into barbarians in the midst of civilization...'p324
The Fall Revolution extrapolates possible futures of the political-violence industry and observes: "They don't want a fight on their hands. They don't want to conquer us, they want to buy us out." p523 Ultimately,"The survival that matters for the long haul is for the short term." p329
This is a long, challenging and thought provoking ride, and still I get the feeling that its not over.
KM doesn't take sides. He delves into his alternate realities and proves capable of inhabiting multitudinous points of view. Unafraid to pose the big questions that are usually obscured by moralistic and ethical blindness, he plays with ideas by stringing them out to their logical surprising conclusions. "What if capitalism is unstable and socialism is impossible?" p16 he wonders in the introduction.
"This was the evil, this was the threat. The proliferating constructions of supposedly human devising, the corporate state systems, which always turned out to be inimical to human interests but always found a good reason to grow further." p59
"The trouble with our wonderful society is that it constantly leaves people behind...turns masses of people into barbarians in the midst of civilization...'p324
The Fall Revolution extrapolates possible futures of the political-violence industry and observes: "They don't want a fight on their hands. They don't want to conquer us, they want to buy us out." p523 Ultimately,"The survival that matters for the long haul is for the short term." p329
This is a long, challenging and thought provoking ride, and still I get the feeling that its not over.
August 7, 2009
MacLeod himself first, and brilliantly, pointed out that "History is the trade secret of science fiction." It's a maxim that he's taken to heart - more perhaps than any other sf writer, MacLeod is adept at conveying the grand cyclic rise and fall of humanity's fortunes. He demonstrates a deep understanding of the permanence of change and the impermanence of our particular institutions - while never sacrificing the sharp focus on individual human lives and how they matter that makes fiction compulsively readable.
Divisions is actually two books in one - it's a conveniently-packaged omnibus edition of the novels The Cassini Division and The Sky Road. It's also not the first in MacLeod's series about the "Fall Revolution"; that place falls to an earlier duology called Fractions (comprising The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal). But it doesn't really matter which you pick up first. MacLeod doesn't fall into the series writer's trap of following (and falling in love with) a single character, or even group of characters. Each book about the Fall Revolution stands on its own, a separate tile in a grand mosaic.
The Cassini Division, for example, follows spacer Ellen May Ngwethu (the name means "Freedom," according to MacLeod) as she spearheads an expedition to New Mars through a wormhole orbiting Jupiter. This is hard-edged, big-ticket science fiction, full of SFX that would strain Hollywood budgets... but such flashy, gigantic construction projects in space are not at all what the book is about. MacLeod attends closely to human-sized complexities. Ngwethu, it turns out, is not the most reliable of narrators, and she has at least one grave personality quirk - a tragic flaw, almost, in classical Greek terms - that blinds her to some significant potential allies.
The Sky Road, in contrast, is set on a pastoral post-apocalyptic Earth whose technological level is nearly back up to pre-Industrial Revolution standards (with some significant exceptions) after a collapse known, perhaps ironically, as the Deliverance. Socially, it's much regressed, whether compared to our wasteful 20th and early 21st Centuries or to the milieu in which Ellen May Ngwethu moves. The protagonist here is Clovis colha Gree, a callow lad who, even though he's an historian in training and part of the workforce building the first space ship in generations, is still something of a bumpkin. Clovis gets beguiled out of his rustic existence by an exotic woman, Merrial, a "tinker" whose allure is not merely physical but also philosophical - she offers explanations for aspects of young colha Gree's society that he barely knows enough to question.
Interleaved with the chapters about Clovis and Merrial are others set in the past that led up to this backward future, where Myra Godwin is the leader of the "International Scientific and Technical Workers' Republic" (forsooth - an unwieldy title which gets immediately shortened in the novel to ISTWR) in central Asia, adjacent to the Republic of Kazakhstan on an Earth not too much removed from our own. The divide between the haves and have-nots has sharpened and deepened, and most of the haves have taken the Sky Road into space habitats - leaving Myra to preside over the disintegration of an Earth not too much removed from our own.
It all hangs together, too - MacLeod's very different societies are all plausibly-drawn and all have their proponents, who are often in opposition, who often caricature each other's ambitions (while glorifying their own, of course), but who are never simply cardboard villains and wooden heroes. All of MacLeod's star players have feet of clay; all of them (well, most) have their gazes fixed on the stars. And... I don't know whether you've gleaned it from the above, but many of MacLeod's strongest and most memorable characters are women, too - individuals who stand out when contrasted against each other and who pass the Bechdel Test - although they're usually interested in men in general (or in particular), they don't always think about men, and never define themselves solely in relation to 'em. This too makes for depth and interest beyond the usual for science fiction or, indeed, for any genre of fiction.
In sum: Ken MacLeod is one of the finest sf writers working today, this is some of his best and most entertaining work to date, and we're lucky indeed to have him.
Divisions is actually two books in one - it's a conveniently-packaged omnibus edition of the novels The Cassini Division and The Sky Road. It's also not the first in MacLeod's series about the "Fall Revolution"; that place falls to an earlier duology called Fractions (comprising The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal). But it doesn't really matter which you pick up first. MacLeod doesn't fall into the series writer's trap of following (and falling in love with) a single character, or even group of characters. Each book about the Fall Revolution stands on its own, a separate tile in a grand mosaic.
The Cassini Division, for example, follows spacer Ellen May Ngwethu (the name means "Freedom," according to MacLeod) as she spearheads an expedition to New Mars through a wormhole orbiting Jupiter. This is hard-edged, big-ticket science fiction, full of SFX that would strain Hollywood budgets... but such flashy, gigantic construction projects in space are not at all what the book is about. MacLeod attends closely to human-sized complexities. Ngwethu, it turns out, is not the most reliable of narrators, and she has at least one grave personality quirk - a tragic flaw, almost, in classical Greek terms - that blinds her to some significant potential allies.
The Sky Road, in contrast, is set on a pastoral post-apocalyptic Earth whose technological level is nearly back up to pre-Industrial Revolution standards (with some significant exceptions) after a collapse known, perhaps ironically, as the Deliverance. Socially, it's much regressed, whether compared to our wasteful 20th and early 21st Centuries or to the milieu in which Ellen May Ngwethu moves. The protagonist here is Clovis colha Gree, a callow lad who, even though he's an historian in training and part of the workforce building the first space ship in generations, is still something of a bumpkin. Clovis gets beguiled out of his rustic existence by an exotic woman, Merrial, a "tinker" whose allure is not merely physical but also philosophical - she offers explanations for aspects of young colha Gree's society that he barely knows enough to question.
Interleaved with the chapters about Clovis and Merrial are others set in the past that led up to this backward future, where Myra Godwin is the leader of the "International Scientific and Technical Workers' Republic" (forsooth - an unwieldy title which gets immediately shortened in the novel to ISTWR) in central Asia, adjacent to the Republic of Kazakhstan on an Earth not too much removed from our own. The divide between the haves and have-nots has sharpened and deepened, and most of the haves have taken the Sky Road into space habitats - leaving Myra to preside over the disintegration of an Earth not too much removed from our own.
It all hangs together, too - MacLeod's very different societies are all plausibly-drawn and all have their proponents, who are often in opposition, who often caricature each other's ambitions (while glorifying their own, of course), but who are never simply cardboard villains and wooden heroes. All of MacLeod's star players have feet of clay; all of them (well, most) have their gazes fixed on the stars. And... I don't know whether you've gleaned it from the above, but many of MacLeod's strongest and most memorable characters are women, too - individuals who stand out when contrasted against each other and who pass the Bechdel Test - although they're usually interested in men in general (or in particular), they don't always think about men, and never define themselves solely in relation to 'em. This too makes for depth and interest beyond the usual for science fiction or, indeed, for any genre of fiction.
In sum: Ken MacLeod is one of the finest sf writers working today, this is some of his best and most entertaining work to date, and we're lucky indeed to have him.
Read
April 12, 2013This volume comprises The Cassini Division and The Sky Road.
The Cassini Division: In the 24th century, post humans, god-like descendents of humans who transformed themselves with high technology, have warped the very fabric of the solar system for unknowable reasons. Ellen May Ngewthu has a plan to rid humanity of these beings, but she must first travel the entirety of the Solar Union, convincing others that post-humans are the threat she knows they are...
The Sky Road: Her rockets redundant, her people rebellious, and her borders defenseless against the Sino-Soviet Union, Myra Godwin appeals to the crumbling West for help as she faces the end of the space age. And, centuries in the future, as humanity again reaches into space, a young scholar could make the difference between success and failure. For his mysterious new lover has seduced him into the idea of extrapolating the ship's future from the dark archives of the past.
March 18, 2014
Ken M had the ability to take 2000 pages of very dense plot and in turn it into a great story. The Sky Road felt like all the filler between story material turned into a novel, done fabulously well, but still I wasn't convinced in the long read that the final book met the standards he set in the first three. Although the chances are good that the problem was with me as a reader. I had a problem with the political message throughout all the novels and it distracted me from the series as a whole.
What I realized after a few days of digesting the work after completing it was that I like his voice and the flow of narrative and will have to try other works to see if the under currents that I find distracting are a constant or just necessary for the Revolution novels.
What I realized after a few days of digesting the work after completing it was that I like his voice and the flow of narrative and will have to try other works to see if the under currents that I find distracting are a constant or just necessary for the Revolution novels.
Want to read
November 8, 2016Picked up this 2 Volume Kindle eBook edt. as it was cheap after I read the 2 star review by Ben Babcock. While his rating was only two stars, the main themes interest me enough, having read some books with near future or post-singularity themes - and having even more on my bought-TBR list. Also his detailed review does not warrant 2 stars for me, based on the review I would have given 3 to 3.5 stars, rounded to 4.
Explanation of the term: Singularity link to Wikipedia entry.
Explanation of the term: Singularity link to Wikipedia entry.
January 10, 2011
The Sky Road was a much stronger book than Cassini Division, which almost had me swear off MacLeod. It wasn't a bad book as space-operatic romps go, but plenty of the character and plot points had me groaning. Fortunately Sky Road was much better.
October 3, 2013
Almost as good as the first part.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews