re:mote voices

Title: Newton's Wake
Author: Ken MacLeod
Publisher:Orbit

Newton’s Wake is the eighth novel by writer Ken MacLeod, described on the cover notes as a stand alone novel, which will be a first for him. Though in saying that, one always had the impression with what became the Fall Revolution sequence that it wasn’t necessarily intended as a series, and certainly didn’t have the same built in continuity as the Engines Of Light trilogy.

With Newton’s Wake MacLeod seems to be at his freshest, and on reflection the same can be said of each of the starting points he has written. With that, Newton’s Wake embraces many of the ideas that permeated through those previous seven novels, to varying degrees – though in some ways the reference points of The Fall Revolution are clearer.

As a starting point, we have a group coming through a gateway to a terra formed planet. This establishes the characters of the Carlyles, and in particular Lucinda Carlyle, the head of this group. The Carlyles control a series of worm hole based gateways, which link a whole series of planets scattered with the remains of post-human technology. There are various factions, and Lucinda expects to find that the planet’s locals belong to one of those established factions. However things start to go wrong quickly, when the locals show up they seem to be a new group of humans previously unencountered, and Lucinda ends up captured in the process of the Carlyles retreat back through the gate. As a starting point we have something which is riffing off some classic SF ideas, most obviously expressed in the film/tv series Stargate, and in the comic Warheads, which probably few will remember – the Carlyles probably have more in common with the Warheads, a motley crew of mercenaries in thugs travelling the universe through gateways.

From here we start to get in to the meat of the novel, and as usual with MacLeod there is a degree of politics that come with that. In his debut novel [which I understand was published after some of his later novels in some places], The Star Fraction, the US-UN had established a star wars system to monitor for the rise of artificial intelligence – designed to prevent the kind of events witnessed in the Terminator films. With Newton’s Wake MacLeod twists this idea, here the Americans have failed to prevent one of their AI’s from achieving independence. Europe spotting this has launched a first strike against America, with the result of the smart bombs achieving intelligence of their own – Earth plunging into a war between humanity and the machines.

The planet that the Carlyles have found with the start of Newton’s Wake are what they would call the Runners – the humans who have fled Earth, leaving it in a mechanical meltdown. Here we have something of The Stone Canal, to survive the journey through space human personalities have been chipped – downloaded into computers, to be returned to flesh once their computers have established a suitable new world for them. As far as the runners of their planet Euridyce are concerned they are the last survivors of what happened on Earth. As far as the Carlyles are concerned however, they betrayed the real survivors, those who struggled through the rubble that was left when the machines got bored and stopped fighting. Humanity fought its way back from the edge of this potential extinction, the result reflecting the clash between the characters of the Stone Canal when they return to Earth space in the Cassinni Division.

The discovery of the Runners of Euridyce causes a human wide upset, allowing for resurgence of the Returners, the faction of Eurydicians who wanted to go back but were outvoted/fought. The fight over the new opportunities that the Eurydicians offer in market terms, and the continually expanding understanding of the post-human artefacts causes brings the various factions into a struggle for control and superiority.

As I’ve said many of the ideas covered in Newton’s Wake cover ideas familiar from MacLeod’s work. But here he brings more of them together at once, creating a heady mix of SF and politics, driving it all towards conflict. There are some great SF scenes here – the emergence of the Carlyles through the gate right at the start, and then the arrival of the first non-Euridycean space ship, how those who believed the gates were a government sponsored conspiracy are forced to shift their views with the arrival of the Knights Of Enlightenment’s colossal spaceship over their capital city.

With the other side of the book, MacLeod actually downplays his consistent communist characters of the past, though with the DK they are present. He does however manage to continue to follow in the footsteps of The Stone Canal and Cosmonaut Keep, bringing his Science Fiction back home with his Scottish connection. In this case, the Carlyles are a family of Glasgow thugs, loan sharks and bullies, who fought their way from the cities ruins, and were in the right place at the right time to take control of the wormholes.

For many the duty of Science Fiction is to provide an alternate view on contemporary events, which is something MacLeod does with his particular political bent. In this case we see another version of what might happen – in the Fall Revolution many nations collapsed in on themselves, creating civil wars and mini-states, while in the Engines Of Light, the Soviet Union had swept across Europe instead of collapsing, pitting the European Soviet Union against the US. In the case of Newton’s Wake, the current European Union has risen to clash against an out of control United States, forcing the EU to launch a first strike. The results are America Offline, the remains of what once was America, the DK which join the communist powers of Asia and Europe, the Knights Of Enlightenment who combine the non-communist Asian powers of the likes of Japan, Singapore and India. Leaving the Euridyceans, who are mainly the core survivors of Europe.

Obviously I am a fan of Ken MacLeod, I picked up The Star Fraction when it first came out, and have been following his work with enthusiasm ever since. While the adherence to a strict trilogy with the Engines Of Light may have seen him stifled a little by continuing too long in the same territory, Newton’s Wake has the sort of freshness that the start of that trilogy has, along with the earlier volumes of The Fall Revolution. Newton’s Wake is best summed up in one line, spoken by a Returner brought back to life during the course of the book to find a world of “war machines, zen mechanists and Glasgow gangsters”.