
I seem to be obsessing with all things Singularity of late, but Ken MacLeod’s Newton’s Wake has a less optimistic take of it, calling it the Hard Rapture, where billions are uploaded without their will, eventually leading to a great war between the humans and the AIs. In the book however, this has happened in the future-past, and Newton’s Wake is really about the descendants of the post-apoclayptic survivors encountering their centuries-old forebears who fled the Rapture in another part of the galaxy.
Having crammed Cold War ideology, posthuman slavery, as well as penning not a few folk songs and operas, there’s really too much going on in this book for me to cover, but suffice to say, it was quite a trip. I’ve read a few of his novels before, but there’s so many ideas going on in this one that it’s really quite a headrush. MacLeod’s probably the first person to come up with the idea of using temporal causality as a dogfight tactic, which is pretty damn cool in my book.
Newton’s Wake
(ISBN No: 1841492248) Check NLB Catalogue for item availability.
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