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wintermute93's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
brian9teen's review against another edition
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
3.0
infinispace's review against another edition
2.0
Review: http://infinispace.net/2013/01/newtons-wake/
namulith's review against another edition
1.0
A very hard read. The problems started right at the beginning, when the future Scottish vernacular made me doubt the ebooks integrity. I don't know if native speakers have the same issues, but for me it was very hard tae read. It took some week until I was ready to give the book a second chance. This time it went a lot smoother, until somewhere between halfway and two thirds, when I stopped again. I finally finished it today, but it was a fight.
The main problem I had was that there's no continually likeable character in the whole book. The main character seems like a supporting character most of the time. Some of the supporting characters are good, but they don't appear often enough to help getting through the story.
The story is the second problem I had with this book. It felt incoherent, more like loosely connected short stories. There is this huge force mentioned throughout the book and when it finally makes an appearance this big buildup just deflates.
The main problem I had was that there's no continually likeable character in the whole book. The main character seems like a supporting character most of the time. Some of the supporting characters are good, but they don't appear often enough to help getting through the story.
The story is the second problem I had with this book. It felt incoherent, more like loosely connected short stories. There is this huge force mentioned throughout the book and when it finally makes an appearance this big buildup just deflates.
eoghann's review against another edition
4.0
I've read and enjoyed Ken MacLeod's early science fiction novels, but somewhere along the way I lost track of his output. Perhaps because he's not as well known here in the US and his books tend to be less visible. So while this book has been out for some years now, I'm only just getting around to it.
I expect MacLeod's work to have a strong political element to it and that isn't really true for Newton's Wake. The various cultures in the book certainly have very distinct political systems but they are comparatively shallow representations and that element really takes a back seat to what is, as advertised, a space opera. That may well make this novel much more approachable for many readers than other stuff by MacLeod.
There are certainly a lot of interesting things going on in this world. MacLeod posits a human centric universe after a hard rapture has happened. His thought process being that inevitably some humans would get left behind (for one reason or another) and what would they do exactly? Turns out they don't exactly like sentient AI's very much because sentient AI's don't consider them very important. All of which makes a lot of sense and sets up an interesting backdrop for the story to play out on.
The early, and I think most interesting part of the novel takes place on the world of Eurydice which is a carefully balanced society that contains the people who fled from Earth while the rapture was going on and who have been cut off from the rest of the galaxy since then. Other people left Earth later on though and there are several powerful factions out there. The discovery of Eurydice essentially threatens the political stability between these groups.
Our focal character is Lucinda Carlyle, a member of a particularly thuggish clan who have gained control of a wormhole system. I'll admit to a bias here in that it was fun to read a protagonist who is not only Scottish but frequently uses Scots words. I'm not sure how well things like muckle or Glasgow Kiss translate to everyone else though.
As the situation on Eurydice starts to spin out of control, Lucinda travels further afield and we are introduced to the other political powers and find out more about the nature of this post-rapture universe. All of which was interesting, but less immediately so than the maneuvering on Eurydice itself.
And then in the final section... it sort of spins of in an unexpected direction and gives us... well... not really an ending at all. I mean. It ends. And technically most key things are addressed. But I was left wondering what the point had actually been.
So there's a lot of great world-building that goes on. MacLeod looks at all sorts of effects that might result from surviving a hard rapture, and the ability to clone and replace bodies and minds. The characters are engaging too. But the story it just seems to trail off. I found the satirical aspects fell flat for me too. There's a good number of them, but mostly they felt to broad or lacking subtlety
That said I enjoyed it quite a bit. I generally find Macleods work a little frustrating because he tends to be very ambitious in what he's trying to do and he doesn't hit 100% of the time, but they are rewarding reads nevertheless.
I expect MacLeod's work to have a strong political element to it and that isn't really true for Newton's Wake. The various cultures in the book certainly have very distinct political systems but they are comparatively shallow representations and that element really takes a back seat to what is, as advertised, a space opera. That may well make this novel much more approachable for many readers than other stuff by MacLeod.
There are certainly a lot of interesting things going on in this world. MacLeod posits a human centric universe after a hard rapture has happened. His thought process being that inevitably some humans would get left behind (for one reason or another) and what would they do exactly? Turns out they don't exactly like sentient AI's very much because sentient AI's don't consider them very important. All of which makes a lot of sense and sets up an interesting backdrop for the story to play out on.
The early, and I think most interesting part of the novel takes place on the world of Eurydice which is a carefully balanced society that contains the people who fled from Earth while the rapture was going on and who have been cut off from the rest of the galaxy since then. Other people left Earth later on though and there are several powerful factions out there. The discovery of Eurydice essentially threatens the political stability between these groups.
Our focal character is Lucinda Carlyle, a member of a particularly thuggish clan who have gained control of a wormhole system. I'll admit to a bias here in that it was fun to read a protagonist who is not only Scottish but frequently uses Scots words. I'm not sure how well things like muckle or Glasgow Kiss translate to everyone else though.
As the situation on Eurydice starts to spin out of control, Lucinda travels further afield and we are introduced to the other political powers and find out more about the nature of this post-rapture universe. All of which was interesting, but less immediately so than the maneuvering on Eurydice itself.
And then in the final section... it sort of spins of in an unexpected direction and gives us... well... not really an ending at all. I mean. It ends. And technically most key things are addressed. But I was left wondering what the point had actually been.
So there's a lot of great world-building that goes on. MacLeod looks at all sorts of effects that might result from surviving a hard rapture, and the ability to clone and replace bodies and minds. The characters are engaging too. But the story it just seems to trail off. I found the satirical aspects fell flat for me too. There's a good number of them, but mostly they felt to broad or lacking subtlety
That said I enjoyed it quite a bit. I generally find Macleods work a little frustrating because he tends to be very ambitious in what he's trying to do and he doesn't hit 100% of the time, but they are rewarding reads nevertheless.
setteno's review
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
astroneatly's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
thearbiter89's review against another edition
3.0
High concept space opera that loses steam in a big way two-thirds of the way through.
Newton's Wake is one on a flurry of science fiction novels in the 2000s that tried to explore what a post-Singularity universe might look like from the perspective of the left-behinders. MacLeod has written here an intriguing rendition of it - at parts slightly satirical and trope-savvy; at others strikingly optimistic in its outlook on human survival.
But as in may of Macleod's works the tone set from the outset is relatively parochial - by dint of the fact that the protagonist and her merry family of wormhole rentiers are Scottish by descent, tae the point that everythin' that's said by is spelt in a broad Scottish brogue, which, ye might expect, gets a wee bit unreadable at times.
Said protagonist Lucinda is a scion of the Carlyles, a powerful, Corleone-style family with a strict internal code and loose external morals, who control the network of wormholes that form the fabric of post-Singularity civilization across the galaxy. Said civilization is split into three major blocs (and this is where the satire comes in) - the space Amish America Offline (AO) who are basically a bunch of Luddite pastoralists, Democratic Korea (or Kampuchea), who are basically a combination of every socialist-communist vestige left in the early 21st century (read: mostly North Korea), and the Knights of Enlightenment, Japanese techno-ascetics who eschew the use of rejuvenation technology (yes, people can come back from the dead in this universe, if they so choose).
Anyway, Lucinda Carlyle is on an expedition to investigate a strange alien planet of Eurydice on the other side of a wormhole gate, when she encounters an entire lost human colony - who haven't gone feral or weird or anything, but have in fact established a bustling presence on the planet and are comfortable to the extent that large portions of the novel are about the grandiloquent stage productions of one of their playwrights and a couple of resurrected 21st century singers who find themselves on this brave new world. Said colony is bustling, but the planet is littered with strange post-human artifacts that, ruffled by the Carlyles' arrival, are beginning to stir.
MacLeod has great fun fleshing out this universe in all its too-strange-for-fiction style outlandishness, and for the most part, he does it well. Even small details of this odd hodgepodge of futurity stick in my mind weeks after finishing the book, and the entire edifice drips with self-awareness and an aversion to tired sf tropes. After escaping Eurydice, Lucinda flits from place to place via wormhole, encounters the locals, and hightails out in a bid to return to the family fold so that she can relay the bad news that the control mechanism for the wormhole network is located on the planet. Then there's a strange side-journey into the heart of a mysterious dead world orbiting a neutron star, where a cache of post-human tech is stored, and Lucinda faces death for the first time. It's all very interesting and heady stuff.
But ultimately, after having his fun, Macleod must have thought that there was a need to end the story post-haste, and so, he did. But not well - everything just suddenly shifts in tone, from the laconic, slightly satirical showpiece of post-post-Singularity hijinks to some faux-dramatic and pathos filled ending in a whiplash. All the plot threads that were just chugging along at the outset all get pulled taut and tangled together in myriad places. The end result is a confusing and not-very-compelling tangle that gets bundled up in a too-neat bow at the very end. Just like this review.
I give this: 3.5 out of 5 black sickle harvesting machines
Newton's Wake is one on a flurry of science fiction novels in the 2000s that tried to explore what a post-Singularity universe might look like from the perspective of the left-behinders. MacLeod has written here an intriguing rendition of it - at parts slightly satirical and trope-savvy; at others strikingly optimistic in its outlook on human survival.
But as in may of Macleod's works the tone set from the outset is relatively parochial - by dint of the fact that the protagonist and her merry family of wormhole rentiers are Scottish by descent, tae the point that everythin' that's said by is spelt in a broad Scottish brogue, which, ye might expect, gets a wee bit unreadable at times.
Said protagonist Lucinda is a scion of the Carlyles, a powerful, Corleone-style family with a strict internal code and loose external morals, who control the network of wormholes that form the fabric of post-Singularity civilization across the galaxy. Said civilization is split into three major blocs (and this is where the satire comes in) - the space Amish America Offline (AO) who are basically a bunch of Luddite pastoralists, Democratic Korea (or Kampuchea), who are basically a combination of every socialist-communist vestige left in the early 21st century (read: mostly North Korea), and the Knights of Enlightenment, Japanese techno-ascetics who eschew the use of rejuvenation technology (yes, people can come back from the dead in this universe, if they so choose).
Anyway, Lucinda Carlyle is on an expedition to investigate a strange alien planet of Eurydice on the other side of a wormhole gate, when she encounters an entire lost human colony - who haven't gone feral or weird or anything, but have in fact established a bustling presence on the planet and are comfortable to the extent that large portions of the novel are about the grandiloquent stage productions of one of their playwrights and a couple of resurrected 21st century singers who find themselves on this brave new world. Said colony is bustling, but the planet is littered with strange post-human artifacts that, ruffled by the Carlyles' arrival, are beginning to stir.
MacLeod has great fun fleshing out this universe in all its too-strange-for-fiction style outlandishness, and for the most part, he does it well. Even small details of this odd hodgepodge of futurity stick in my mind weeks after finishing the book, and the entire edifice drips with self-awareness and an aversion to tired sf tropes. After escaping Eurydice, Lucinda flits from place to place via wormhole, encounters the locals, and hightails out in a bid to return to the family fold so that she can relay the bad news that the control mechanism for the wormhole network is located on the planet. Then there's a strange side-journey into the heart of a mysterious dead world orbiting a neutron star, where a cache of post-human tech is stored, and Lucinda faces death for the first time. It's all very interesting and heady stuff.
But ultimately, after having his fun, Macleod must have thought that there was a need to end the story post-haste, and so, he did. But not well - everything just suddenly shifts in tone, from the laconic, slightly satirical showpiece of post-post-Singularity hijinks to some faux-dramatic and pathos filled ending in a whiplash. All the plot threads that were just chugging along at the outset all get pulled taut and tangled together in myriad places. The end result is a confusing and not-very-compelling tangle that gets bundled up in a too-neat bow at the very end. Just like this review.
I give this: 3.5 out of 5 black sickle harvesting machines
sreeves's review
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0