Dark Light
Engines of Light: Book Two
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
'A modern-day George Orwell' - SFX
'A hectic ride, through slaloms of audacious complexity, irreverent ingenuity and paradox as purposeful as it is playful' - GUARDIAN
The Second Sphere is thousands of light years away from Earth - if Earth still exists. For Matt Cairns and the cosmonauts of the Bright Star, this distant corner of the galaxy is their new home.
But the Second Sphere is also home to other civilisations, lifted from their worlds by a race of god-like aliens. On Croatan, two of these civilisations live a precarious co-existence, separated by eons of technological advance. The arrival of the Bright Star is an event that may trigger disaster, for this is the first human-crewed starship to arrive at the ancient colony.
And all the time, hidden among the stars, the gods are watching. They have always been watching.
Following on from COSMONAUT KEEP, which was shortlisted for the 2002 Hugo Award, this is the second book in the dazzling new space opera series by one of SF's most exciting new authors.
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
In this worthy second installment in MacLeod's Engines of Light series (after 2001's Cosmonaut Keep), human beings and a few other intelligent planetary species now know themselves to be little more than playthings, manipulated at will by the Powers Above. These virtually transcendent beings live for millennia in such out-of-the-way places as the Oort Cloud, the Asteroid Belt and magma beneath planetary crusts. Matt Cairns, once a citizen of 21st-century Edinburgh, has found himself apparently rendered immortal and transported to the Second Sphere, an interconnected web of civilizations located thousands of light-years from Earth. The humans and two other advanced species who inhabit the Second Sphere, saurs and krakens, are the descendents of intelligent beings kidnapped from Earth over the ages by the Powers Above for inscrutable reasons. Having broken an embargo on human-controlled interstellar flight, Matt and his friends travel to the planet Croatan in search of answers to the mystery behind the Second Sphere's existence, but it soon becomes clear that their presence may well trigger a planetary revolution. This middle book in what will be at least a trilogy doesn't stand well on its own, so readers are advised to begin with Cosmonaut Keep. The novel features several interesting alien species, some fascinating speculations on the relationship between sex and gender, and MacLeod's trademark mix of radical socialist and libertarian politics. Both novels are worth reading but not quite up to the high mark established by his previous series, The Fall Revolution. FYI:MacLeod'sThe Sky Road won the British Science Fiction Association Award and is a finalist for a Hugo Award.
