Newton's Wake

[sawyl]

Freed from my responsibilities, I've finally got around to reading Newton's Wake by Ken MacLeod. Not sure why I didn't read it when it came out in 2004. Must have had other priorities, but I'm damned if I can remember what they were.

The year is 2367. The Hard Rapture has come and gone, leaving weird chunks of post-human cleverness in its wake. Clevernesses like the kilometer high diamond on Eurydice which Lucinda Carlyle, on her first outing as combat archaeologist in charge, has been sent to investigate. After comprehensively screwing up, Lucinda finds herself stuck on Eurydice, betrayed by her virtual advisor and forced to put up with some very lame resurrected folk singers. Eventually, after the arrival of a rival faction finally convinces the Eurydiceans that they're not alone in the universe, Lucinda uses a wormhole to make good her escape and, after bribing a bunch of terraformers with a copy of the Shakespeare pastiche Prince Leonid to buy passage back home, makes her back home in disgrace.

In an attempt to buy herself back into her clan's good books, Luce hooks up with a couple of rapture obsessed misfits and heads out to steal a teleportation device, catching some serious rads into the bargain. Meanwhile on Eurydice, the folkies find themselves involved in a political play while Cyrus Lamont, pilot of the mining ship Hungry Dragon, frets over the subversion of his ship's AI and its new-found enthusiasm for building post-human war machines.

So, time to sum up. Ideas wise, the book is very much dominated by the sorts of Cartesian questions that arise from the concept of a superhuman singularity: how would a super intelligent being treat humans; will it stick around or get bored and bugger off elsewhere; are people recovered from uploads real; are people recovered from memory backups real; does any of it really matter anyway? There was even a joke about omega point simulations, which suggested that the uploaded societies weren't much use because they tended to spend all their time on religion or building giant prayer wheels in an attempt to run a denial of service on their universe. Religion as means of wasting the resources of the universe — sounds like a pretty convincing explanation to me.

In general, I liked this book, although I have some minor reservations. I liked the characters, especially Lucinda and Morag, although I was a little disappointed at the way that Isaac Shlaim disappeared part way through, only to appear again at the finale. Although the general plot worked well, I found the sections about Eurydice and its artistic community distinctly wearing. Yes, I know that the folkies are supposed to be bad and I know that the plays are supposed to be lame, and I yes, I guess MacLeod deserves kudos for being able to demonstrate this quite so comprehensively, but I still wish he hadn't been quite so comprehensive. One section would have been more than enough.