KEN MacLEOD

Newton's Wake is a space opera, all right, but it isn't just any space opera. There's a lot more going on here than one might first suspect. While it's almost every bit as political as his Fall Revolution novels, MacLeod nonetheless chooses a much more light-hearted approach this time. He's kicking up his heels and having a high old time with this one, bringing in loads of satire to give this transhumanist adventure yarn a whimsical edge we haven't quite seen from him before. And while it might be up in the air as to who's keeping up with whom these days — MacLeod with Stross or Stross with MacLeod — the nice thing for us is that we're getting good stories out of it.

The book opens near the end of the 24th century, following a time when the technological Singularity, here called the Hard Rapture, has left the human race getting back on its feet by the hardest. The posthuman machine intelligences, having wreaked all sorts of havoc on Earth, have up and gone who knows where — some suggesting they've vacated the universe itself. Humanity itself is scattered, but among those left behind in the solar system are the Carlyle family, an opportunistic business consortium who have taken control of the Wormhole Skein, a series of gates created and abandoned by the posthumans that string together numerous worlds across space. The Carlyles are still exploring the Skein, and have so far used it to re-establish contact with a number of human colonies throughout space whose members fled the Hard Rapture (among them the snarkily titled America Offline).

The Carlyles' explorations eventually lead one team, led by Lucinda Carlyle, to the distant world Eurydice out in the Sagitarrius arm. There they discover a colony of people who are only too surprised to see them; the Eurydicians were among refugees caught up in a conflict between one group, the Returners, who chose to return to Earth and fight the war machines the best they could, and the Runners (who prefer to be called Reformers), who high-tailed it out of there. A stalemate was reached in which the Runners agreed to carry with them the uploaded personalities of all the Returners, and then they had themselves uploaded and fled into space. Their ship deposited them on Eurydice, where the Runners were resurrected and, thinking that in all likelihood they were the only surviving humans and that their journey might well have taken tens of thousands of years, proceeded to build a thriving culture that is nearly utopian. "Cornucopia" machines take care of everyone's wants, though, perhaps not surprisingly, no one has gone out of his way to encourage resurrection of the Returners.

The Carlyles' appearance is a shock to the Eurydicians in more ways than one. To be confronted with proof that humanity has survived elsewhere was shock enough, but the Carlyles' appearance has done more than that. Lucinda and her team have apparently activated an enormous relic, a kilometer high tower that some think was built by the posthumans, and others believe might be the creation of another alien civilization entirely, one that has gone extinct following its own singularity. This tower is now manufacturing the war machines that laid waste to Earth. Lucinda, ostracized by the family back home for screwing everything up, eventually learns that the tower was not only the product of the posthumans — built out of the remains of the starship that carried the Runners to Eurydice — but that it is the device that generated the Wormhole Skein. Suddenly, Eurydice is attractive to a number of ideologically opposed human colonies, among them the Knights of Enlightenment, who seek to salvage any posthuman tech they can find and have the military might to back it up. War is in the offing.

MacLeod peoples his story with a colorful rogue's gallery. Lucinda is an appealing heroine, a woman caught up over her head in events she didn't mean to set in motion, and which she has no idea how to stop. And while, considering MacLeod's outspoken leftist politics, it isn't exactly pushing any envelopes for him to take on such capitalist bugaboos as crass commercialism and superficial pursuits of hedonism, he still uses enough imagination that such sequences are funny without being mean-spirited. (In the Eurydician capital New Start, the ability to make clothing with nanotech means that fashion fads go in and out on a daily basis.) We meet the rebel playwright Ben-Ami, who openly mocks the city's new allegiance with the Knights by reviving two Returner folk musicians, Winter and Calder, for a play which he openly hopes will cause riots. Winter and Calder themselves become figures of some self-effacing pathos, displaced in time and never sure whether their memories are real or computer constructs a la Blade Runner. Another memorable tragicomic figure is Morag, one of a multitude of "rapture-fuckers" addicted to the rush of jacking into posthuman tech, where they swear they are brought into contact with a higher plane of existence.

Newton's Wake rushes us headlong, if unevenly, through interstellar adventure before it comes a cropper near the end by turning sharply left towards more metaphysical themes. MacLeod is fascinated by the idea of what humanity's relationship to its technology will turn into when the technology becomes, for all intents and purposes, godlike. Again, nothing new here; it was, after all, the central theme of the Matrix movies. But rather than go the philosophical psychobabble route with it all, MacLeod, like a good transhumanist (though I have no clue if he'd ever call himself one) suggests the results might not be all bad. Could posthuman machine intelligences, capable of self-replicating, learn to create their own realities, not merely of the virtual kind? And might some people, given the chance to upload themselves to these realities, choose to do so and be happier there? And is there a problem here? (Never far from satire, the book offhandedly suggests one: the possibility of Napster-style pirating of people!)

Newton's Wake is one of those swell stories in which you realize, as it is ending, that the author has barely scratched the surface of its thematic potential. I'm sure MacLeod will happily get around to scratching away in a sequel or two. Until then, we have this charmer, whose wit extends right to its subtitle. Sure, it's a space opera, but it isn't just any space opera. Look deeper.