ORBzine Book Reviews: "Ken MacLeod" March 2002
The Sky Road
Ken MacLeod is a Scottish author, and his style is most similar to that of Ian McDonald and Iain M. Banks . The main section of the book is set several centuries in the future, in a strange post-apocalyptic Scotland where society exists in a state of technologically advanced barbarism. The narrator is a young History student who works as a welder on the construction of a space rocket. He is seduced by a beautiful woman, an engineer, who persuades him to help her access certain secret historical archives that hold the memoirs of The Deliverer. Every second chapter is a flashback to the life of the Deliverer herself. She was a Trotskyist while at Glasgow University in the 1970s, and by the year 2059 she is de facto ruler of a small country. Her battles are political, since she and her people are trapped between vicious mega-capitalists and ultra-Bolsheviks.
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Cosmonaut Keep
Ken MacLeod is a Scottish author, and his style is most similar to that of Ian McDonald and Iain M. Banks . The main section of the book is set several centuries in the future, on a strange planet where humans live alongside reptilian aliens called Saurs. The narrator is a young Biology student who also works as a mathematician for the navigation of a space rocket. He is seduced by a beautiful woman, an interstellar merchant. His grandfather persuades him to discover how his ancestor made contact with aliens and transported the humans to the new world. Every second chapter is a flashback to the life of the student's ancestor. He was an Anarchist in Edinburgh in the year 2049. His battles are political, since he and his people are trapped between vicious mega-capitalists and ultra-Bolsheviks. Scotland is Independant from the UK, and the EU is controlled by the USSR! If all this sounds familiar, that is because the book is more or less the same as MacLeod's previous novel The Sky Road. There are minor differences in the setting, but the book is lacking in conflict. The story can be classed as Hard SF, but the sciences are sociology and economics. All in all, it is quite uninspiring.
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The Stone Canal
Ken MacLeod is a Scottish author, and his style is most similar to that of Ian McDonald and Iain M. Banks .
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