2004; 339 pages. Full Title: Newton’s
Wake – A Space Opera. New Author?
: No. Genres : Space Opera; Hard Science
Fiction. Laurels: 2004 British Science
Fiction Award (nominated); 2005 John W.
Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (nominated).
Overall Rating: 6*/10.
The year is 2367 AD, and the human race has
abandoned Earth. Artificial
Intelligences have taken over the planet, and the few humans that survived are
now fleeing for their lives and star-hopping across the galaxy.
Fortunately for them, FTL (Faster Than
Light) space travel is now
possible, and a web of wormholes (dubbed “the
Skein”) has been discovered as well.
The search for other habitable planets and other sentient lifeforms is
an ongoing project.
The Skein is controlled by a
clan of Scottish entrepreneurs called “the Carlyles” and Lucinda Carlyle is
leading her very first exploring mission for the family.
It behooves her to impress her familial peers with her leadership skills
and lucrative results.
Lucinda and her team have just
stepped out of a stargate and made an astounding discovery – a planet, dubbed Eurydice by its natives, that's flourishing with sentient life!
Alas, everything goes to crap after
that. The natives aren’t little
green men; they’re just another group of exiles from Earth, whose existence was up until then unknown. Lucinda and her group
are cordially welcomed, but placed under a kind of loose house arrest. Eurydice's secret is out and it won’t be long before rival groups of galaxy-roaming Earthlings start invading this planet to exploit its resources.
As well as the
Artificial Intelligences.
What’s To Like...
We follow three major plot threads in Newton’s Wake, each with their own protagonist, namely:
Lucinda’s
adventures on Eurydice,
Cyrus
Lamont’s asteroid-mining enterprise, and
Ben-Ami’s
planning and staging of “deep sky” concerts and musicals on Eurydice.
Each one was fun to tag along with.
Lucinda wants to investigate a mysterious henge on Eurydice, as well as
go on a suicide mission to recover a QTD (“Quantum
Teleportation Device”). Cyrus
has a close personal relationship with his talking spaceship, which occasionally turns intimate. And when Ben-Ami wants to see
someone in concert, he doesn’t let the fact that they’ve been dead for a couple hundred years stand in his way.
The book is written in English and Scottish, not American; but I didn’t find this distracting. There are some way-kewl 24th century weapons; and we finally get to fly around in those
self-driving aircars that everyone’s been predicting since the 1950’s. Talking starships are nothing new to sci-fi novels; neither is
zipping around the galaxy via those wormhole gates; but they were both still fun
to experience. The “revival tanks” technology was a nice innovation; so was
the “universal recognition”
programming, which allows you to instantly and permanently recognize every face
and remember every name.
Ken MacLeod’s writing style is
a wordsmith's delight with lots of fancy and obscure (at least to me) vocabulary. Some of new words are real, such as a “cromlech” (there's one on the book’s
cover); others are made-up, such as “fittle”,
an acronym corruption which means …well, we’ll let you figure that out on your own.
I liked the mention of “cosmic strings”, which I presume was a nod to the late, great Stephen Hawking. There are musical nods to Phil Ochs and Billy Bragg; I doubt either have ever been mentioned before in a science fiction novel. It was fun to play the 24th century children’s game of “sea, ship, fish” ; and learn from what present-day game it evolved. The book's title appears on page 105 and is not, as I mistakenly presumed, a reference to a funerary vigil/feast for some poor, dearly-departed soul named Newton.
Ratings…
Amazon: 3.5*/5, based on 66
ratings.
Goodreads: 3.69*/5,
based on 2,544 ratings and 142 reviews
Kewlest New Word ...
Thrawn (adj.) : ill-tempered; perverse;
twisted; crooked.
Others: Chibbing (v.); Cromlech (n.), Squick
(n.); Birled (v.).
Things That Sound Dirty But Aren’t…
“Oh
dear. The things I see when I’m pointed
the wrong way.” (pg. 57)
“I sit in the
bowels of Marx. I swim around the
trousers of Mao.” (pg. 128)
Excerpts...
“These aren’t-“ he began.
“-anything I’m familiar with,” said
Ben-Ami. “They must be the
starships.” He turned, eyes shining, to
the two musicians. “This is marvellous!”
The end of our isolation! It is no
longer possible to doubt it! (…)
“Yeah, that’s nice,” [Winter] said,
shrugging Calder’s hand from his shoulder.
“In itself. Can’t say I’m
thrilled at the thought of the ships’ inhabitants.”
“Why not?” asked Ben-Ami. “They are human beings like us.”
“Exactly,” said Winter, as Calder cackled. (pg. 107)
The machine and the man had been together a
long time. The Hungry Dragon knew
Lamont a great deal more intimately than he knew it. Even so, it did not expect the next question,
as Lamont theatrically arranged himself in a midair lotus position.
“Tell me about your dreams,” he said.
“I do not dream.”
“Let me clarify,” said Lamont. “I refer to fleeting combinations of thoughts
and images that intersperse your logical mental processes.”
“Ah,” said the machine. “Those.” (pg. 145)
“I look like the
wife of some geezer picking up a Nobel Prize,” Carlyle said. “For chemistry.” (pg. 55)
I was surprised to see the low
ratings at both Amazon and Goodreads for Newton’s
Wake, particularly since it has been nominated for two prestigious Sci-Fi Awards, but there are valid reasons for that.
First of all, while the long, detailed world-building made for a very convincing setting, it came at
the cost of a lack of an overarching plotline. Halfway through the book I asked myself what the main storyline was, and sad to say, I couldn’t
come up with anything. Eventually one
develops – a journey back to Mother Earth - but even that fizzled out after a
promising start.
The ending felt anticlimactic to me. It could only be justified if Newton’s
Wake turned out to be the first book in a series, but that appears not to be the
case.
Other reviewers pointed out
that the story is full of already-forgotten references – things like David Koresh becoming a famous religious influence, and America On Line still being a major entity in
the 24th Century. Yeah, fat
chance of either of those panning out. Some were
also put off by Lucinda’s Scottish accent, but I had no trouble decoding what
she was saying, so this seemed a bit nitpicky.
Last and least, I counted 21
instances of cussing in the first 10% of the book. For me, that felt just about right for a
Space Opera novel.
6 Stars. This was my second Ken MacLeod sci-fi novel. The other one was Cosmonaut Keep, and is reviewed here. Both of them were great on world-building but short on plot. Maybe that's just the author's writing/storytelling style and I haven’t gotten used to it yet.
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