metric system is harder than fiction, look at those huawei phones ( )

A good, but not great near future scifi novel. In 2070, FTL travel has been discovered, while at the same time we have cloud colonies on Venus. With near instantaneous FTL, some countries have settled an Earth-like planet, to discover strange alien life, strange alien stone structures - and bees. The book is partly first contact, partly Earth-bound conflict between blocs. The conflict is mostly on Venus and Apis, the new planet. Good tech feel, good conflict, good action, but I still don't understand the title! ( )

Some interesting SF ideas, but the jumping about between 3 different strands of story, each with multiple barely-differentiated characters, was quite confusing and ultimately counter-productive. I might pick up the next book, but it won't be a "must read" for me. ( )

MacLeod, Ken. Beyond the Hallowed Sky. Lightspeed Trilogy No. 1. Kindle, 2021.
Now that Mike Resnick is gone, Ken MacLeod is the go-to guy for left-leaning space opera. Beyond the Hallowed Sky, the first novel of his new trilogy, begins when an Indian graduate student in England receives an airmail letter in her own handwriting that that she does not remember writing and that contains a mathematical argument that concludes with the formula V=xc, where x can be quite a bit larger than one. It is postmarked from Kabul, a city she has never visited. It is, in short, math supporting faster-than-light travel with implications for time travel. The alternate near future in which she lives has experienced a “Cold Revolution” that has realigned world power. Scotland and Europe are now at odds with an Anglo alliance that includes England. America, still full of religious extremists, has recently rediscovered democracy. Russia is a third power center. The Union and the Alliance both employ powerful AIs. The Union AI, Iskander, is a major character in the story. The Indian graduate student living in England defects to Scotland where she becomes part of an effort to build the Union’s first faster-than-light spacecraft. Then things get complicated. 4 stars. ( )

This book, first in a trilogy, was on my Christmas list, but it didn't arrive in time and landed on my doormat on New Year's Eve. I devoured it eagerly and I wasn't disappointed. (Well, I was disappointed by the fact that Macleod's publisher hasn't issued a first edition hardback, but that's just the collector in me.)

I had wondered how much further Macleod could go in exploring radical politics in his novels; well, once more he brings us a new variation on an old theme. The book is set some fifty years into the future; the world here is split into three power blocs. There is the Alliance (basically, the Anglosphere plus India), the Union (the EU, including a unified Ireland and Scotland), and the Co-ordinated States (Russia and China). Each has its own universal and all pervasive AI that assists citizens and the government; and relations between the three states are cordial - rather enforced by the AIs - but highly competitive.

There are multiple POV characters; whilst we start with a theoretical physicist, Lakshmi Nayak, located in London with family in India, we quickly add a number of other characters, in Scotland and - elsewhere. Lakshmi receives a letter, seemingly from her future self, that gives the theoretical basis of a faster-than-light drive, which everyone says is impossible and which she herself actually doubts. But her attempts to even find the flaws that she is convinced must be in the paper lead her to defect from the Alliance to the Union, setting off a train of events that have remarkable implications.

Along the way, we travel to a Union floating base in the atmosphere of Venus and see it through the eyes of an Alliance attaché who is not all he seems. We also spend some time with a Scottish family who work in shipbuilding and who were active in the "Cold Revolution" that made the Union, in particular, what it is today. The grass-root politics of the Union is shown in some detail, but Macleod refrains from telling us what is what and how we got there; the reader has to reconstruct events between now and the novel's future, and this is part of the attraction of the book.

A lot of the setting is probably broad wish-fulfilment on Macleod's part, at least when it comes to Scotland, though there are aspects of his Clydeside under the Union that I suspect he wouldn't personally welcome but expects would turn out that way (basically, the Faslane naval base being an English/Alliance enclave in Scotland). The way this affects the lives and decisions of people in the novel is quite telling.

Throughout, there are regular bursts of dry wit and some Easter eggs for those in the know. Now just a matter of waiting for the next book! ( )