Newton's Wake
Novel
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- €3.99
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- €3.99
Publisher Description
'Stylish, witty, and engaging!' - San Diego Union Tribune
'Exciting...Accessible to the average reader as well as the hardcore SF fan. This is a work sure to keep the reader on the edge of her seat.' - Romantic Times Bookclub
The Hard Rapture took Earth's best minds away. Now the rest are about to find out where they went ...
Centuries ago, space settlers and soldiers fled to the stars from the sentient AI war machines that engulfed Earth. They colonised Eurydice, a planet whose rocks contain traces of its own war machines - some of which still guard a vast, enigmatic artifact on a remote tundra.
When an expedition raids this strange artifact, the Eurydiceans discover that they weren't the last survivors of humanity after all. Their leisured lifestyle is about to be disrupted by new arrivals for whom Eurydice is a prize worth fighting over.
And the long-dormant war machines are awakening ...
Newton's Wake is a stunning stand-alone space opera, charting the struggle for human survival in a universe dominated by post-human intelligence.
Books by Ken MacLeod:
Fall Revolution
The Star Fraction
The Stone Canal
The Cassini Division
The Sky Road
Engines of Light
Cosmonaut Keep
Dark Light
Engine City
Corporation Wars Trilogy
Dissidence
Insurgence
Emergence
Novels
The Human Front
Newton's Wake
Learning the World
The Execution Channel
The Restoration Game
Intrusion
Descent
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Amid the somewhat strident politics there are some outrageously funny patches in this over-packed space opera from Nebula and Hugo finalist MacLeod (Cosmonaut's Keep, etc.). In the 24th century, brash young Lucinda Carlyle takes her first big chance to prove herself to her wheeling-dealing clan who control the skein, a network of "gates" transporting people and equipment instantaneously between planets. In the Hard Rapture war centuries earlier between the United States and united Europe, run-amok American AI took over the brains of humans. Survivors flung into space include the gawkish farmers of America Offline (AO), the straitlaced Oriental Knights of Enlightenment (KE) and the third-world "commies" who strip-mine planets (DK). Lucinda opens a Pandora's box of shifting alliances that turns 20th-century American sensibilities upside down. Keeping the AO, KE and DK straight can be confusing as Lucinda brawls along her barrack-room Glasgow-dialect way. Perhaps MacLeod's most memorably quirky character, Benjamin Ben-Ami, produces epics like Jesus Koresh: Martyred Messiah, with "a mild-mannered and modest but strong-willed hero" and "gloating psychopathic villains, the Emperor Reno and the Empress Hilary." MacLeod slyly entices Americans to see ourselves as others see us not a flattering picture at all.
