Enjoyed the setup, but lost the plot around 3/4 of the way through and didn't care enough to backtrack. ( )

The author was influenced by the British magazine New Worlds. He was and is a British New Wave writer, who has written hard science Space Opera. He was a computer programmer. His approach to SF is techno-utopian. He is a Scot, and for period was a Trotskyite. This book is part of his Fall Revolution series. It carries the weight of building a fictional universe with a AI and a singularity - it is complicated. It follows several characters on two timelines. One timeline occurs on a planet far, far, away which humans have reached through wormholes, terraformed and organized on libertarian principles. The other timeline starts when several characters are students and young adults in Scotland in the 1970s and follows them into a near future and the Singularity. After that, personalities are uploaded then installed in robot bodies and used for a kind of forced labour. It has a large vision. It is, however, confusing. ( )

This came off as a science-fiction lover's science-fiction novel, and so I liked it a lot, even if there weren't a lot of "big ideas" per se.

The narrative is split in two between the "present day" of the protagonist's life from the 70s to the near future, and the far future on New Mars where his mysteriously rejuvenated self has to intervene in a major political dispute, with alternating chapters helping to bring some structural tension as more and more backstory is slowly revealed. Jonathan Wilde is an anarchist whose friendship with socialist David Reid ends up being very important to the far future. It's not quite a "buddy novel" since there are major issues between the two (like Reid's attraction to Annette, Wilde's wife), but the humorous political debates between the two make up a large part of a novel - there's a lot of light-hearted politics of the "Snow Crash libertarianism" variety, which is always fun to read about. Supposedly MacLeod is very politically active in real life, so a lot of the best political scenes have a humorous roman à clef vibe to them.

Wilde is a bit too constantly self-consciously cool to be a really first-rate protagonist, but his adventures are fun to read about, especially in the "present" timeline where he tries to put some of his anarchist ideas into practice. MacLeod has lots of the kind of funny writing that comes from being a big sci-fi fan, and so you'll read lines like "Night fell, and without headlights we drove on, tirelessly, and discussed how to hack the gates of hell" fairly often. He has a talent for finding good ways of putting things, like "Walking between terminals was a Brownian motion through a Hobbesian crowd" that make the book fun to read, and the ability to make his characters laugh at their own ideals: "'The sunlight really is the white light.' This materialist insight was all that survived of a magic-mushroom trip I'd taken as a student. That and a vision of three goddesses: Mother Nature, Lady Luck, and Miss Liberty, who were - I realized after coming down from it - necessity, chance, and freedom, and indeed the rulers of all."

This was his second novel, and the second in a series. I haven't read the first novel, but I'll be on the lookout for it. ( )

Wow. Finished this book 20 seconds ago and need to say wow before I forget everything I just read.

I had this on my shelf for years, unread. It took me months to read. But it was worth it. This is a *smart* book. But not in a pompous way, not in an academic way (much). In a *story* way. It's ambitious, it's epic, and the scariest thing about it is it comes across as *plausible*.

Avoiding spoilers, the story starts from both the future and the past. Where other books hint at some crucial point that will be revealed to the reader later, this book turns that into the entire arc. But the scope is huge, and takes in everything from 70s politics to hard-and-fast sci-fi, to a love story. Imagine Iain M Banks meets the Matrix meets Aronofsky's the Fountain maybe. You're probably still not close, but...

Definitely convinced me to pick up his other works. And soon.
( )

I took a year's breather between reading Ken MacLeod's first novel The Star Fraction and this sequel The Stone Canal. In this one, he was already experimenting with many of the techniques that I enjoyed in his later Engines of Light series: changes of narrative person, parallel plot-lines that turn out to be nested, and multiple centuries of setting. It covers a time-frame both preceding and succeeding the one in the previous volume, and is definitely in a shared narrative continuum, with at least one point of explicit character contact, as well as many shared events in what was then (when it was written in the 1990s) a conjectural near future. At the same time, I think this volume would make a fine starting point, and that readers could really appreciate it fully without having read the first book.

Politically, the book's protagonist is raised by splinter-schismatic ultra-leftists, enters adulthood as an anarchist, and develops more socialist sentiments late in the course of events. The villain--a far more sympathetic one than in the previous book, but still quite detestable--goes from disillusioned socialist to the figure presiding over an extra-terrestrial "anarchy" in a most revoltingly capitalist manner.

Like The Star Fraction (and Engines of Light, for that matter), The Stone Canal is very much animated by the author's political concerns. To these is added a level of more science-fictional politics concerning the ontological status and social rights of post-human ("artificial") intelligences. In this respect, and with its attention to the dilemmas surrounding nanotechnologically-driven resurrection of the dead, this book reminded me more than a little of Ian MacDonald's Necroville, which had been published the year before. At the same time, it also covers a lot of the ground of space exploration and singularity exploitation that would later be treated in Charles Stross' Accelerando.

I don't think I'll pause as long this time before tackling the next book in the series, The Cassini Division.