Engines of Light Trilogy- Ken Macleod

This last week held a few free days and nights so I tasked myself with tackling the Engines of Light Trilogy by Ken Macleod.  The series is comprised of, in order, Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, and Engine City.  These were the first works I've read by Macleod, and I was reasonably impressed.  At some points the complexities of the plot were hard to follow, but ultimately pulled together in a satisfying and interesting manner.

At least in my reading experience, the novels do one of the better jobs of creating planets that resemble earth, but are just different enough to cause pause, for example, rather than having birds flying around, dinosaurs or bats are the dominant flying fauna.  Within the first book, Cosmonaut's Keep, the reader is presented with two very different stories.

The first is that of Gregor Cairns, a young marine biologist on the earth-like planet Mingulay.  On Mingulay, the tech level is that of around the early 20th century give or take. Mingulain society comprises the "Adamic" races of the giantlike Gigants, the elfish pithkies, humans, the mysterious and advanced alien Saurs, and my favorite, space faring giant squids called Kraken.  In the universe of Mingulay, the Kraken and Saurs have a monopoly on space travel, carefully choosing which technology to share with the humans.  Human traders with illustrious Italian names accompany huge Kraken navigated and Saur operated star ships between the planets.  Needless to say, humans are seemingly at the bottom of the tech tree in this part of the galaxy, with no space faring capability whatsoever. While provoking some questions to how they arrived on this planet in the first place, the revelation that the most recent human immigrants were cosmonauts from earth easily grasped my attention quite firmly.  Gregor is descended from one of the original cosmonauts, and is about to discover the grand plan of his family for the reentry of humanity into the space faring game.

The second story takes place in a near future semi-dystopian Britain which has become part of the larger soviet driven socialist collective of countries. Matt Cairns is a tech programmer with shady connections throughout the industry, and finds himself caught up in the events surrounding first contact with intelligent life, drifting through the solar system in the form of a comet.  Eventual sent up to join the research team located on the comet, Matt and the scientists discover that interstellar travel is easier than could have been thought. The convergence of the two stories was one of my favorite parts of the trilogy. The first half of the book had me thinking of what they could possibly have in common, and then bam, the convergence happened and I was impressed.

Macleod utilizes a fair amount of political dialogue between characters and provoked some thoughts on the role and nature of government.  I can't do the full discussion justice on this blog, but I'll say that importing soviet style political dialogue and anarchist jargon onto a alien world is quite interesting.  I couldn't quite get as engaged with the characters as I would have liked, but ultimately that did not detract from the entertainment value. As I stated earlier, the creation of a distant almost-earthlike society was one of my favorite aspects of the book.  There are plenty of Easter eggs throughout for any history junkies. In conclusion, while not the best SciFi I've read, it was definitely entertaining and the setting awesome enough to recommend.