Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Wide-screen post-Banksian space opera in the shape of Michael Cobley's Ancestral Machines. Despite being set in the same universe as Cobley's Humanity's Fire trilogy, there isn't a great deal of overlap between the book and its predecessors and it works as a successful standalone novel.

The curtain rises with a brief prologue which establishes the scenery. The Construct, a vast AI entity from the previous trilogy, has detected the arrival of a vast solar-system-scale engineering project consisting of hundreds of worlds tied together with a captive star. Concerned that the Great Harbour of Benevolent Harmony represents a threat, the Construct dispatches the drone Rensik Estemil and the Earthsphere soldier Samantha Brock to investigate.

Meanwhile Brannan Pyke, captain of the Scarabus and general scoundrel, wakes up to discover his most recent deal has gone bad, leaving him out of pocket and his ship in orbit over a decaying world. Detecting a distress signal from the world below, Pyke and his crew rescue a small group of survivors who, to the surprise of no-one other than the Scarabus' crew, promptly take command of the ship, dumping their would-be rescuers on the ruined planet.

During their struggle for survival, a couple of Pyke's crew — including Dervla, his sometime girlfriend — are kidnapped by the Shuskar Lords who rule the Great Harbour, which now goes by the less pleasant name of the Warcage. From this point on the action kicks into high gear, with Pyke determined to recover both his ship and his crew. Hopping from planet to planet via series of portals, the crew get caught up in various rebel plots to overthrow the Shuskar, passing through the hands of strange religious cults and oppressive slave-driving aristocrats along the way.

Meanwhile, in the book's third strand, Akreen, a Zavri warrior, discovers that his people, who have long supplied the Shuskar with elite shock troops, may have been tricked into their current position by their supposed masters. Using the memories of seven of his ancestors, whose bickering personalities form a constant backdrop to his consciousness, Akreen embarks on a pilgrimage to discover the truth about the Shuskar and the Zavri historical links with the species who created the Great Harbour. Along the way he finds his path weaving in and out of those of Pyke, Dervla, Rensik and Brock, as events race towards an inevitable final conflict.

Ancestral Machines flies along at a breakneck pace, with the uncommonly lucky Pyke leading the way. As Cobley notes in his afterword, there is more than a touch of Mal Reynolds about Pyke, while the Warcage with its closely coupled chain of hundreds of worlds has more than a parsing similarity with the Verse. The sights and sounds of the Warcage are visceral and well-imagined, the Shuskar — and their bonded bioweapons — are genuinely unpleasant antagonists whose casual sadism, atypically for most genre novels, receives enough close scrutiny to render it justified rather than simply grotesque.

The book is a pacy page-turner — I got through the entire thing in a couple of sessions — with fun characters and an enjoyable setting. If Pyke sometimes comes across as too lucky and too devil-may-care — his attitude annoys Lt Commander Brock more than it could possibly annoy the reader — the other characters do a good job of balancing the worst of his excesses. Required reading for Culture or Firefly fans...