First of all, I apologize in advance for all the quotations I use in trying to review this book, I just want to give MacLeod credit instead of paraphrasing him. Yes I know its kindof lazy, but I"m in a lazy mood, and I want to get this review out, because its a little gem of a book that I dont th...
The Star Fraction is an extremely divisive novel. Partly by design and partly by subject matter. Any book that delves so deeply into the grit and grime of political and economic ideologies is going to be uncomfortable for some of its readers. With that as a given, MacLeod goes and shoots hims...
Apart from the ending, I found Engine City to be the best of the three books in the Engines of Light trilogy; the ending, though, was just dreadful; a nonsensical let down. In fact it seems to suggest a fourth book but, since we’re now twelve years on from Engine City, that would seem unlikely.Th...
First of all, I want to make it clear I am newish to Sci-Fi so will not be comparing it to other authors of the genre.This book is quite extraordinary for me. It has an unusual style in the it has two story lines running side by side, one revealing the history of the characters on Earth, and one ...
Quite a lot of the books I choose to read come from either direct or indirect recommendations. Learning the World by Ken MacLeod was one that I decided to read after a recommendation from a very indirect but trustworthy source. When I saw Iain M. Banks at the Edinburgh Book Festival earlier this ...
Newton’s Wake might be the kind of book that we wish would come to us more often in science fiction, and had MacLeod not almost single-handedly raised the bar of political writing within the genre there could be more than the scant few British SF writers who can keep up with this kind of artistic...
It's after 9/11. After the bombing. After the Iraq war. After 7/7. After the Iran war. After the nukes. After the flu. After the Straits. After Rosyth. In a world just down the road from our own, on-line bloggers vie with old-line political operatives and new-style police to determine just where ...
Winner of a Prometheus and Sidewise Award, this science fiction novella is a comedic and biting commentary on capitalism and an exploration of technological singularity in a posthuman civilization. As a world war rages on without an emerging victor, the story follows John Matheson, an idealistic ...
He waited as the Sydney Harbour ferry puttered into Neutral Bay, cast on and then cast off at the likewise tiny quay on the opposite bank, and crossed the hundred or so meters to Kurraba Point. He boarded, waved a hand gloved in artificial skin across the fare-taker, and settled on a bench near t...
Ben-Ami had no idea what the wares had been, but the air and floor and very beams of the place were pervaded with some scent, spicy and sour, that suggested long-degraded alcohol molecules. The extravagant electricity supply might have originally been to maintain temperature and humidity. Now it ...
And one after another, the slow, laden freighters of the merchants and the fast, sharp fighters of their mercenaries went in. Even on the screen in the aerospace port, with the news-child’s prattling commentary jamming the silence, the sight remained awesome and uncanny: ship after ship vanishing...
A green bronze sculpture of the eponymous sea creature on a plinth in the middle lent it a touch of municipal posh. In the Resort’s better days the plaza might have been a car park. It might yet become one, for all Carlos knew. He squatted on the pediment of the plinth in pre-dawn cold and a glim...
That still left a lot, and it was just lucky that Moh’s message caught his eye. As he read it he laughed at the desperate naivety of the mercenary’s direct approach. So Catherin had taken his advice and disappeared. Too soon. Donovan stood up and tried to massage his stiff shoulders with his achi...