Engine City

My expectation of the third book of the Engines of Light series was low. I had read the previous two novels over the course of two years and was unimpressed by either of the two; both receiving a mediocre three star rating. This rating stemmed from the fact that the storyline was boring, involved in banal politics and lacked character familiarization. Book three, Engines of Light pushes much of this aside, thankfully. It's widely said that MacLeod's novels are `politically challenging' and `intellectually ambitious' or so the inside cover wants you to believe. Besides the Engines of Light series, I have also read his stand-along novel Learning the World which was even more boring than the first two books of the aforementioned series. Yes, they are `politically challenging' but it is not the type of science fiction which I prefer (what exact type that is is nearly impossible to define.). But within the pages of Engine City I found a world richly detailed, reminiscent of a steampunk novel. And although the previous two novels lacked characterization, I found myself attached to two characters- Matt and Volkov, which just may be latent fondness of the characters themselves. The entire rest of the cast can be heaped into a large generic pile, as far as I'm concerned (though I admit a liking to the tokin' dinosaur Salasso). The book began a great pace, earning it a 4-star start. A bit of muddle interrupted a slim percentage of the novel before the pace picked up again into a 4-5-star rating. I might have even ranked the book 5-stars if it hadn't had been for two key factors (because bad news travels in pairs [or in the case of celebrity deaths, it travels in threes]). The series would definitely been better if it had been edited in such a way to abridge the 800 pages or so series into a nice 500-600 pages single issue, much like Hamilton or Reynolds would have done in one of their voluminous tomes. The separation between the forgettable novels casts a dark shadow onto the finale. The last reason Engine City gets 4-star rating is its continuation of dismal characterization. I can't remember personalities or relate to or even remember the bloody names of most of the cast, except those individuals mentioned above. But where the novel shines in its tainted umbra is in the wholeness of its completeness. I feel satisfied with the way the pieces have come together, while at times I didn't understand which pieces were which (because of the two-year reading span). Event the writing seemed to have improved, as I chuckled or reflected a few times when reading passages like "The window was open but the bar was open," or "Black-furred flying squirrels pawed through it like demonic rescue workers," or "When the box is large enough, even the greatest minds sometimes have difficulty in thinking outside of it." NOW, only if the entire series could be condensed or abridged into 500-600 pages would the series itself earn 4-stars, rather than a collective 3-star rat

In this futuristic story, Gods are real, and sometimes they are a real pain--so much so, that eventually some of their charges might commit theicide. This--and much more--happens in the course of a book that does a pretty good job of presenting various kinds of alien beings. The fear of being invaded and "taken over" plays a part in this story, as does the wanderlust of starfaring races and the old-fashioned desire for power. Technology does not rule the storyline in this novel, though there's enough of it; to the author's credit, characters--human and otherwise--are sufficiently developed that they successfully carry the day and the plot. We get to know them well enough to care about their fate, and this provides the emotional power in the ultimate part of the book, almost lyrical in its suggestion of continuity beyond death.

This is one book I thoroughly enjoyed. Each chapter was packed with new ideas and unexpected plot lines that drived the story forward; and despite the rich content, the pacing was executed just right. I have to admit I was afraid that the series might end badly, especially after reading the second book in the trilogy (Dark Light). Alas, my fears were unfounded, and Ken Macleod delivered briliantly! The series had made a lot of use of, and reference to, popular alien culture - from "grays" to flying saucers. However, it was thankfully *not* about that particular popular culture, despite the superficial resemblance. It is about human potential, about inner drives - both human and extraterrestrial, about change, about history repeating itself, and about the wide unknown universe. All in all, it was an interesting and fun journey through a universe filled with conscious asteroids, saurs (alien grays), kraken starships, utopian societies, future-historic events, and the down-to-earth familiar characters that shaped this future history. The Engines of Light is the first work I've read from Mr. Macleod, and I should say it makes me look forward to reading his other novels.

In retrospect, I suspect I should *not* have been surprised by the ending of the book; in a sense, the ending--and the coda which follows it--were set up in the very first book in the trilogy, "Cosmonaut Keep." The central theme of this book appears to be irony, from first page to last.MacLeod has created a bizarre universe, populated with many different creatures, including saurs, krakens, selkies, and, perhaps the most alien of all, the eight-legged Multipliers. There's a lot of intriguing ideas jammed in here.Unfortunately, all those ideas, in a book this short, mean that a lot of characters get short shrift. Likewise, the book isn't long enough to stand on its own; why certain characters behave the way they do doesn't really make sense unless you've read the previous two books. Thus, the series ends leaving a lot of questions (not the least of which is why the book is written in the present tense when, and only when, Matt Cairns is the viewpoint character).All in all, though, if you've read the first two books, you'll probably want to read this one just to see how it ends. If you haven't, start with "Cosmonaut Keep" and "Dark Light" before reading this one.

_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.