Saturday, 5th of June, 2004

Ken Macleod is a very funny man. I’ve almost finished Newton’s Wake, his new standalone space opera (so it declares itself, and you can see the glint in the guy’s eye as he wrote that…) Dedicated, by the way, to Charlie and Feòrag, it turns out that it’s about the only thing to come close to Charlie’s own Singularity Sky in terms of its approach to the subject matter. There’s also what seems to be a hugely entertaining homage to Alastair Reynolds, involving the retrieval of an advanced artefact from a very difficult place under farcically extreme conditions…

Newton’s Wake is Macleod doing the New Space Opera in his own Macleodian terms. It’s set after a “Hard Rapture”, in which the military AIs of the American industrial complex undergo a Singularity, and decimate the human population of the solar system before disappearing off into a posthuman never-never land over yon horizon, leaving mysterious artefacts for the various human factions to use, reverse engineer or ignore as is their wont. As usual there are communists and libertarians of sorts, there’s a Utopian post-scarcity society, and there are Scots in space.
These particular Scots are ruled over by a clan of Glaswegian gangsters (the “bloody Carlyles”), except that because of the combined technologies of life-extension and mind-backing-up, people from wildly separated generations can co-exist. Two woeful Glaswegian folk singers from the time of rebellion against the machines are resurrected among all this, while post-human artefacts on the world of Eurydice (until recently unknowing that there is a galaxy of other human survivors out there) are about to create a new world order (so to speak)…

Other factions include the Knights of Enlightenment (who study post-human technology and work a lot of it out, but eschew any use of technology such as backups on themselves, preferring yoga and Zen-like self-control to keep from ageing) and the DK (Demokratische Kommunistbund? Democratic Korea? They’re communists who believe in self-sufficiency), as well as America Offline, who worship “Jesus Koresh”!

There are heaps of hilarious throwaway lines (including one about Microsoft patches), many of which turn out to be serious plot points later on… But despite being a little while away from the finish still, I just had sit down and write out this quote, describing what happens when you try to experiment on post-humans in a virtual environment:

The uploads replicate and develop relationships. Most of them go very bad. You sometimes get an entire virtual planet of four billion people devoted to building prayer wheels in an attempt at a denial of service attack on God.

So it’s vintage Macleod, but for once I don’t feel awkward about this singular ethics. He’s got sympathetic post-humans and even AIs, and his way of showing every viewpoint possible has really come to the fore here. This may seem like a throwaway joke space opera, but in some ways it’s the best Macleod yet, a must-read for anyone interested in the vanguard of contemporary sf.

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