The Sky Road

Reviews / Votes

Ken MacLeod doesn't just create believable futures--he breaks them down to explain what makes them tick. -- WIRED Science fiction's freshest new writer...MacLeod is a fiercely intelligent, prodigiously well-read author who manages to fill his books with big issues without weighing them down. -- SALON Ken MacLeod brings dramatic life to some of the core issues of technology and humanity. -- VERNOR VINGE For my money, Ken MacLeod is the current champion of the very smartest kind of New Space Opera: a relentlessly engaged thinker about nitty-gritty political-economic-social matters who also operates on the Romantic end of the genre by imagining worlds that offer vast (and even godlike) possibilities for humankind. -- LOCUS In the sequence that started with The Star Fraction, MacLeod has created a future where the crucial historical event is left-wing students arguing about anarchism in the 70s. On this turns the destruction and renaissance of civilisation, here and elsewhere in the human galaxy. In his fourth book The Sky Road he productively fills in some of the gaps. This is the story of Myra, Trot turned entrepreneur, whose nuclear deterrence-for-hire is so crucial to the event known by some as the Fall and others as the Deliverance. It is also the story of young Clovis, part-time worker in the yard building the first spaceship for centuries, part-time scholar trying to find out what Myra the Deliverer was really like. MacLeod's quirky and intelligent take on the world of power politics--the paradoxes that arise when ideology is made praxis--and his charmingly cynical gift for engaging and engaged protagonists, are something to which the SF audience has become used. What this book also has is a profound sense of the beauty of a simpler and stiller world; MacLeod's real gift is his capacity to see all sides of a question, even when he is sure of the answer. * Roz Kaveney, AMAZON.CO.UK * MacLeod is up there with Banks and Hamilton as one of the British scifi authors you absolutely have to read * SFX *