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.... ( )