Ken MacLeod (1) (1954–)

Another novel that I've been meaning to read for years but, having finally gotten around to it, I'm not sure that it was worth the effort. Keeping in mind that I've experienced diminishing returns with MacLeod's writing the last few times that I've read his work, the reality here is that he probably hasn't changed much, but I have. This is not to mention that even though AIs and down-loaded personalities are people too in contemporary SF, none of these entities were really holding my attention. About the best praise that I can give this book is that I liked it just well enough to consider reading the follow-on novels, and I probably need to try some of MacLeod's books that aren't political tracts set in space.… (mer)

So to the final volume of Macleod's Corporation Wars trilogy, and at first it seems that we are going to have more of the same - individuals being uploaded to tech in a future disputed space, where they engage in battles with sentient robots and each other for increasingly obscure corporate aims. Except we now find out about the sort of agenda the robots - "freebots" - have. And a new element is thrown into the mix when a landing is finally made on the superhabitable world that is the object of all this corporate manoeuvring, and something new is added to the mix - its biosphere. The lifeforms of the world are not passive participants in the invasion of their world.

The outcome is pretty much as you'd expect, but there are some narrative twists that add MacLeod's unique slant to the story. He also adds further observations on the nature of life, society and neo-Nazism. But as the corporate AIs who are trying to direct affairs go a little further into explanatory mode, I did find myself wondering what the rest of humanity was doing, back on Earth (some 23 light-years away). The corporate players in this story are not megacorps, but medium-sized corporations or even just consultancies acting as contractors. There are a vast number of players off-stage, and what passes for an Earth government - the Direction - cannot be devoting all its time to this fiddling little corporate dispute (as it must look like from the outside). This trilogy has been set in one star system identified for colonisation. There must be an almost infinite number of others, all happening in the same universe but beyond the bounds of this story. Only in the closing pages do we get even the slightest hint as to how far humanity has gone, and I found that vaguely disappointing. On the other hand, there is an amusing little twist in the way the simulated worlds are displayed. Read about it on the bus to the spaceport....… (mer)

An interesting mix of re-tread and new (to me) ideas. Without giving things away, there are at least two big plot devices lifted from elsewhere - one openly acknowledged (from Blish) and one not as much (pretty sure it was Stross). It made me wonder how many other bits and chunks where borrowed too.

But that isn't necessarily a bad thing in sci-fi. Like a good pop re-make, a jazz standard or a blues riff, as long as the author tries to make it his own rather than flat out copy, it's all good.

Lots of food for thought here, and one of the few times that old cliche actually fits. This is a future nightmare that's all too believable.

Well worth reading.… (mer)

We return to the distant star system (well, only 23 lightyears away, so still in the neighbourhood, but distant by present-day standards) and the conflict between avatar proxies of two AI-driven corporations. We are pitched directly into the action as it stood at the end of the first novel, Dissidence, with most of the same characters. There are personal revelations, and changes of allegiance.

This is very much a middle novel of a trilogy; there are few loose ends tied up and the book ends, if not on a cliff-hanger, then certainly at a point where more is about to happen. But along the way,. Macleod has continued his exploration of power, governance, and the position of the individual (nether secure nor in exercise of much control). Trans-humanism is, it seems, little impediment to the exercise of control by the powerful, even if those powerful individuals are silicon-based rather than living, breathing carbon-based lifeforms.

Meanwhile, the sentient robots are still evolving their own ideas of how society should be arranged.

The opening lines tell me that Macleod starting writing this book shortly after the death of his friend Iain (M.) Banks, as it is an almost direct quote from the opening of Banks' first science fiction novel Consider Phlebas.… (mer)