The Stone Canal is the 2nd book in the really rather brilliant Fall Revolution series by the Scottish written Ken MacLeod. This was his 2nd published novel overall (he has 13 novels to his name meanwhile – you see, I'm a bit behind with reading his stuff. My loss!).
This is the follow-up to his dazzling debut The Star Fraction, and, believe it or not, he upped the ante. Before I get going with the book itself a word of warning – this is a review for a book in a series, it will, by its very nature, contain spoilers for the earlier book. If you don't mind then read on, otherwise go & get the first book (The Star Fraction) and read this first. Actually, go and get the entire series (4 books - the other ones are The Cassini Division, and The Sky Road), full stop, it's worth it.
A few words on Robert J Sawyer's Factoring Humanity, an Alien Messages (SETI?) and First Contact story which spins a good if slightly over-egged and unrealistic (even within SF parameters) yarn. It was nominated for the Hugo Award, but didn't win it.
We are not alone. To the contrary – for almost 10 years now humanity has been receiving alien messages from the direction of Alpha Centauri A, roughly every 31h. The first 11 were easily decoded (nothing terribly exciting in there), the other 2832 have resisted every attempt to make sense of them. The only constant is that the number of bits transferred is, for each message, the product of two prime numbers (and no, not always the same ones either), which suggests that these should be interpreted graphically. Heather Davis, of the University of Toronto, is the leading researcher on the topic (although no one knows much…), and an instant celebrity now that the transmissions have ceased to arrive. What do they mean? And why have they stopped? Are the aliens waiting for an answer before resuming?
"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the City of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea." What a way to start a story, to set a scene. Start with the action. You see, this is some kind of post post-apocalyptic world. It has moved on from the 60-minutes war, with its Orbit-to-Earth atomics and its Tailored-Virus strikes. 'Lost America' is still a wasteland, the only life the Archaeologists and Scavengers scouring it for pieces of 'Old Tech'. The rest of world had to react to the Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Glaciers that followed the war. Quirke was the first to put a town, London, onto Tracks, so it could move out of harm's way. Nearly everybody followed suit (with the exception of the Anti-Traction League in the East, behind a huge range of mountains) – with towns ranging on wheels, tracks, on runners in the ice wastes, drifting in the clouds, floating on the sea. And so a world of Municipal Darwinism, a town-eat-town world was created, and prospered for a 1000 years. But now prey is getting scarce, and the Mayor of London is forced to take his 7-tier town, with St Paul's Cathedral on top, back out into the Great Hunting Ground and its dangers, looking for towns to eat.
Frank Herbert wrote 5 instalments of his celebrated Dune series, only to leave the story arc unfinished at his untimely death in 1986. But a few years later his son, Brian Herbert, who had already written a series of Dune tie-ins with Kevin J. Anderson, found his outline of how he intended to finish the series with a final book in a safe deposit box.
This is what Brian and Kevin made from this material, or, to be precise, this is the 2nd half, as they turned it into two books instead (the first one was Hunters of Dune). Editing/cutting might have been the better option, in my opinion; there might have been material for one good book, but definitely not for two.
But, before I go any further a word of warning – this, by its very nature, contains spoilers for the 6 books (5 by Frank, one by Brian & Kevin) that went before in the series. If this bothers you then stop reading now.
Here's a review for Maelstrom, the 2nd book in the Rifters series by Peter Watts. I wrote this some time ago, and it's purely co-incidence that this reaches the top of the pile just as Peter has been convicted of 'obstructing a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer' (sentencing has not happened yet, he's facing up to two years in prison). Get this book. No, get the series. It's top stuff, and he needs your support.
N'AmPac has nuked the Grid Authority's power generation station 'Beebe' on Channer Vent, Juan de la Furca Ridge, for reasons unknown. It must have been worth it – the subsequent Tsunami as well as the Earth Quake ('The Big One') from the slipping fault lines left the Coast in tatters. Or in the words of Patricia Rowan, the Corpse who ordered the nuking: "Millions dead. Trillions in damages. Preferable to the alternative, she knew. It didn't help much. Saving the world had come with a price tag attached." But the nuke didn't get everything it was supposed to. Lenie Clarke walks out of the Ocean after walking home 300 miles across the Ocean floor - onto the Oregon Strip, where the refugees are held, nominally until they move on, realistically in perpetuity. And everyone she touches, everywhere she goes, things change. Because Lenie carries something from the deep Ocean, a Nanobe ('?ehemoth') older than the proverbial Martian Mike, simpler than all life on Earth as we know it. And now it's free and on its way to world domination, at the cost of the current Biosphere. Whatever that one's worth…
This is a fascinating book, with some flaws that, sadly, can seriously distract from parts of it. It follows two separate strands – on the one hand we see the life of Dr. John Dee, 16th Century Mathematician, Mystic, Magus, and Astronomer to Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth and her Spy-master, Walsingham. And on the other we follow Alivet Dee (it’s not much of a spoiler to let you know that the last name is no co-incidence), a Apprentice Apothecary, working with Drugs and Perfumes, on the planet Latent Emanation (no, I won’t spoil where that name comes from). Alivet lives on a shoestring, saving all her money to be able, soon, to pay for the release of her twin sister Inkiretta, who has been embonded by the Unpriests, to serve the Lords of Night. You have to see, Latent Emanations’ society has 3, or rather 4 very distinct strata. You have the ordinary human citizens like Alivet, then you have a class of Unpriests and the 9 Families, and above them the reclusive, non-human and inhuman Lords of Night. The 4th layer is at the very bottom, or rather a bit outside of that pyramid, and consists of the Anube, a kind of Jackal-headed bipeds, who were native to Latent Emanation (or whatever they called the planet – the humans, as usual, didn’t care to ask) when the human settlers were brought there by the Lords. And the story kick off as one of Alivet’s potions goes wrong, leaving a (rich) customer dead, and now we have Alivet on the run…
The Stone Canal
