The Great Work. (Cosmonaut Keep - Ken Macleod)

Member Name: Brett Bligh

Product:	Cosmonaut Keep - Ken Macleod
Date:	01/07/01 (36 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Not one but two well-conceived and memorably executed future scenarios, written in an engaging style which keeps the reader turning the pages, combines good science fiction with political debate to produce a novel which is well worthwhile.

Disadvantages: Combination of subject topics may be rather obscure, this is the first novel in a series and so not all plot strands are resolved, the far-future storyline is very slightly confusing in its opening stages.

Ken Macleod is an author who combines left-wing politics, aspects of computer science and well-realised science fiction together into a successful narrative blend; since these three subjects all happen to be great interests of mine, I immediately warmed to the author. Thankfully, however, it is not only I who has done this, and with Macleod being runner-up for the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice and winner of the BSFA Award once in his first four adult novels alone, any fears I may have had regarding Macleod’s inherent obscurity have been thankfully unrealised.

Macleod’s first four books (‘The Star Fraction’, ‘The Stone Canal’, ‘The Cassini Division’ and ‘The Sky Road’) were set within the same fictional strand — with a deeply politicised world split into small states, each with their own ideology (many with hybrid ideologies made up of socialism and anarchism in various combinations) and with the whole thing watched over by a militarised US/UN alliance whose capabilities included space-born weaponry — although they did not all contain the same characters or even necessarily follow on from one another in any definite order.

Macleod’s new novel, ‘Cosmonaut Keep’, strictly speaking his sixth (there was a children’s novel called ‘Cydonia’ about which I know little), abandons the previous work altogether, opting for a different cover design and the explicit legend “Engines of Light, Book One” to affirm the breaking of linkage.

The book essentially features two ongoing storylines, each of which occur in alternating chapters. One storyline, featured in odd-numbered chapters, is set in the far future, on a colony world called Mingulay in a Second Sphere of colony worlds set up by the ‘gods’ which has had no contact with Earth for a very considerable time. Gregor Cairns is a student of marine biology; his grandfather is
a man who carries the traditional colony title of Navigator, and Gregor has for a long time been charged with solving, by hand, mathematical calculations which are purported to be a part of the Great Work. When Gregor learns the truth of what the Great Work is he, along with his research associates Elizabeth and Salasso (an alien of the extremely long-lived Saur species), must go in search of the original colony founders, long rumoured to have achieved immortality and be living incognito somewhere on Mingulay. The situation is complicated still further by the arrival of a light-speed trading ship from planet Nova Babylonia and traders the de Tenebre family, who are also interested in finding the original colony founders and may also be interested in grabbing a majority stake in the Great Work. The fact that a love-triangle is developing between Lydia de Tenebre, Gregor and Elizabeth does not help, either.

The other storyline is based in the much nearer future, at a time when Russia has invaded Europe and the EU is now run by a democratic socialist government. Matt Cairns is a freelance project manager, and for a while now has been running shady operations for an American woman called Jadey, whom he heavily suspects of being an American agitator working for a counter-revolutionary cause but who he is willing to help, mainly because he has a hopeless crush on her. When Jadey passes him some extremely classified information which she has apparently received from a guard sympathetic to her cause, and is subsequently arrested, Matt must defect to the USA. World politics is undergoing an extremely tumultuous phase, after the CPEU general secretary and EU leader Gennady Yefrimovich announces that first contact has been made with an extraterrestrial intelligence and public disorder ensues. The staff of the space station which has made contact with the alien intelligence have mutinied, citing the fact that Europe is using the situation to political gain, and soon Ma
tt finds himself travelling from the US to the station and interacting with an alien intelligence itself to a spectacular end…

The immediate overall impression that one gets from this book is that Ken Macleod has attempted to retain those aspects of his writing which have previously made him a relatively popular writer and yet branch out from his old form of writing into a new novel structure and sales model which will make his work more popular with those who have yet to become enamoured of his rather distinctive novels.

To this end, we have a storyline set in a future world which bears a few surface similarities with that of his previous major sequence, with a socialist Europe facing a capitalist United States (although at least in this sequence the UK is fully a part of that Europe with a stable national government rather than the chaos of the regional and mutually hostile regimes it played host to in that sequence). If Macleod ever makes major literary splashes outside the science fiction fraternity I would be prepared to bet that such a future world eventually becomes known as “Macleodian” or some other similar adjective, such has it become a staple of Macleod’s work now in two series of novels.

Macleod also looks to be seeking to retain something of his old writing in the narrative format of this novel by not only alternating storylines chapter by chapter but also by changing the person in which the narrative is told (first-person in the near-future tale, third person with two main viewpoint characters in the other) and occasionally even changing the tense. This will be familiar to anyone who has read ‘The Stone Canal’ or ‘The Sky Road’; it is a technique which Macleod has now used in more than half of his adult fiction, and hence could almost be viewed as a ‘traditional’ Macleod technique by now.

In terms of what Macleod has changed from his previous work, we must
immediately look to the fact that Cosmonaut Keep is “Engines of Light Book One”. Of course, those with a more cynical eye might say that this is simply a publisher’s attempt to mimic the successful model used by fantasy authors to achieve their great sales (fantasy now easily outsells sf in most bookshops) by requiring all who wish to follow this tale to buy several volumes (will this be a trilogy?). In my view, however, although this may indeed be a side-effect of this new series, it probably was not the reason behind its inception: instead, I believe, Macleod has determined to tell a story at a more leisurely pace which allows him to reduce the density of his prose. This is actually a simple continuation of the trend Macleod has been moving within ever since he started publishing (in fact, Macleod’s publisher turned away the initial draft of his first novel, The Star Fraction, because it was so dense they could not even discern what was supposed to be happening), and an answer to several of his critics.

This change of pace for Macleod is obviously going to have both positive and potentially negative effects on his books. Positively, I would have to say that this novel has substantially more claim to be a ‘page-turner’ than any of Macleod’s previous novels, with the relative simplicity and slick narrative flow of the writing meaning the average reader is liable to be able to take in this novel in considerably larger chunks than with any of Macleod’s previous four novels.

On the potentially negative side is the danger for novels published as part of a series to not actually contain enough storyline themselves in order to satisfy the reader who has bought that book; this, obviously leads to the reader feeling that they have been ‘cheated’ and is frankly one of the main reasons why I dislike the fantasy genre. Here, however, I think that Macleod has sidestepped the pitfall: the near-future s
toryline is effectively ended for good by the end of the volume, and the two storylines are nicely interlinked in the final few chapters, to the point where Chapter Twenty-one, the final chapter, is the first and only one to break the alternating story format, and the novel feels complete and coherent, almost as if Matt Cairns has been the narrator all along.

Perhaps the other main difference between this novel and Macleod’s previous work is the inclusion of aliens. In the previous sequence there were no extraterrestrials, and humanity’s major foes as it moved out into the solar system were itself and a posthuman intelligence made of humans existing within a computer simulated environment whose entire nature was speeded up (“the fast folk”) and whose outwards transmissions were constantly blocked by humanity for fear of what they might do to human computer systems. In this novel, however, aliens most certainly exist, and we actually have a multitude of races to contend with. In the near-future storyline the EU government has announced first contact and Cairns gets to interact first-hand with these enigmatic beings, whilst in the far-future storyline we have the ‘gods’ (whom, I believe, will turn out to be the aliens which contacted Earth in the earlier storyline), the long-lived Saurs, the huge Gigants, and more, a veritable cornucopia of life on a colony world which half left me in mind of Tatooine every time Gregor and company walk into a pub.

All of this seems to signify a deepening of Macleod’s homage to classic sf which in his previous novels was largely signified by having several of his characters actually interested in the genre — strangely enough, it is rare for tales within the sf genre to take into account the genre’s own existence, but thankfully Macleod does this without stepping over the line into self-indulgent parody and provides a justified use of post-modernism in doing so. It
is also apparent, though, that Macleod has determined not to displace any of his other traditional elements in order to incorporate this more nostalgic trope of sf into the picture — his harder, more modern sf is still there, as are the politics and the computer science.

In terms of the politics, Macleod seems to be one of the few authors to actually do the subject justice within the genre. As a former member of the Fourth International and the now-defunct CPGB, Macleod is well qualified to represent the modern state of such politics within fiction, and as someone with more than a passing interest in this area myself I think he pulls it off convincingly. However, Macleod’s novels have never been simple propaganda (they would not have been published if they were, methinks), and he has actually won awards for his novels in the US for ‘Best Libertarian Fiction’ (!).

In terms of computer science, Macleod may have dropped the posthuman people who live in computer-generated environments and evolve at a fantastic rate, but he has introduced some new ideas in their place. I particularly liked the notion that, in the future, projects will be managed by humans but with most of the actual coding and analysis done by Artificial Intelligences, and Macleod manages to make these ideas particularly credible, once again in a subject area in which I have more than a passing interest myself, with perhaps the finest touch of all being the fact that old programmers are still needed to delve down into the ancient operating systems on which everything else runs via emulation (including MS-DOS, amusingly), since the AIs are not adept at manipulating such archaic and irrationally-programmed systems; old programmers, asserts the author, do not die — they simply move to legacy systems.

All of this actually takes me back to where I began, and my fears about Macleod’s obscurity. There are enough people in the country with a knowledg
e of politics (specifically the Left and the attitude of other political ideologies to it) for this novel to attract a readership. There are also enough people versed in computing and management for this to occur. But how many people are seriously interested in BOTH of these disciplines, and as a result how many authors would be willing to include references to both Mick McGahey and Linux (the imaginary ‘Linux Jihad’) in the same paragraph and bet that their readership would have any clue as to what they were referring. Throw in the fact that this novel is set firmly within the sf genre, and you slightly narrow the potential readership yet further. How many people are interested in all three of these disciplines. (I know of 1 — me).

Thankfully, the fact that Macleod has been well recognised by the critics as the extremely able writer that he is, and the fact that he has, accordingly, been awarded a steady stream of prizes and prestigious nominations over the past few years, has, it would seem, given the author sufficient publicity to attract a readership. Hopefully, as this sequence fulfils its author’s promise to “become a landmark in science fiction”, Macleod’s popularity will grow still further, for his work is certainly deserving of even wider praise than it has yet attained.

Recommended.



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PS: the book cover shown is a preliminary version which was not actually used. If you are planning to do some searching in the bookshop, the actual cover can be seen at: http://andromedabook.co.uk/acatalog/CVRKMCOSMONAUT KEEP.jpg

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