Second book of the Lightspeed hard-ish, science fiction interstellar colonization trilogy with: time travel, a Higher-Tech Species, Artificial Humans, omnipresent AI, and competition for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) Travel between nation states creating a geo-political thriller.

My dead tree paperback was a moderate 334 pages. It had a 2023 UK copyright.

Ken MacLeod is a Scottish author of science fiction. He has published about twenty (20) novels in several series and standalone. In addition, he’s published several short stories. This was the second book in the author’s Lightspeed trilogy. I've read almost all of the author’s novels. The last book being Beyond the Hallowed Sky (Lightspeed #1) (my review).

MacLeod is one of my reliable science fiction authors. His stories are typically grounded in hardish science. However, they also contain a good dollop of both expositional politics and philosophy that keep him out of my first tier of authors.

Its strongly recommended reading Beyond the Hallowed Sky (Lightspeed #1) before starting this book. Without it, this book would be incomprehensible.

This second book, makes-up for the cliff-hanger of Beyond the Hallowed Sky. It brings the trilogy to almost an odd resting place for a middle book. It ties-up a number of stray plot lines, but keeps a scant few open for the final book Beyond the Light Horizon.

The four main plot lines from the previous book taking place in a somewhat near future (2067) still apply, but with some modification:

• Evolution of the International Order
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of time travel
• The World Is Not Ready for FTL travel
• Aliens Deep State Government Conspiracy

Earth’s international-order changes as a result of The Union (in which most of the main characters belong) achieving FTL spaceflight.

The Time Travel trope warps into both the time travel and multiverse tropes—which everyone is cool with.

The World Is Not Ready and Aliens Deep State plotlines end.

The six (6) POVs from the previous book continued the narration: Nayak, Grant père, Myles Grant, Owen and Hazeldene. I continued to have a problem with the android 007 character Owen. He was too advanced a technology for 2067. The POV interleaving was technically well-handled. However, as with most books with modest page counts, the character development and pacing suffers with the per chapter character switching. There were too many separate narratives, and not enough pages. MacLeod continued to use a third person POV for the android only,

Spoiler

until it became Conscious through contact with the Fermi

.

The writing was very Scottish. Descriptive prose was better than the dialog. I could find no mistakes in the text. In places it was humorous. The snippets of Scottish dialog were a wee bit hard to read.

There was: no sex, only a small amount of drug usage, and no music in this book of the story. A pity, because all were handled so very well in the previous book.

Violence was physical, and with firearms. Human characters, had perfectly ‘normal’ mortality. (Surprise!) The story was very hard on the synthetic beings and robots. Lots of drones were destroyed. The android Owen continued to have the constitution of a rhinoceros. There was a noticeable lack of gore. Body count was moderate.

Plotting was good, but too busy. The switching between the too many POVs retarded the pacing. The convergence of the plotlines and the ending of some were well handled. However, the first two books should have been merged into a single book to have better served the reader. The Myles Grant plotline which languished in the first book, reached maturity.

This book ended the Deep State of both the Alliance and Co-Ord having kept the existence of the FTL drive a secret for 50-years plot. That had been really hard for me to believe. It required an extreme Suspension of Belief on my part. A conspiracy that large couldn't exist. The solution to it was equally lame. A

Spoiler

multinational, high-level governmental conspiracy of scientists, politicians, and the military called “Black Horizon”

. I decided I just had to get over it.

World building was a logical progression of the previous book, which was very good. The planet Apis' fauna, flora ecology and geography were exposed in an interesting way. The galaxy spanning Fermi aliens were no longer a menacing mystery. However, the solution to the Fermi Alien Problem niggled. I expect the series has not seen the last of them? Tech-wise, the use of drones felt inspired by the Russian Ukrainian Invasion-- very realistic. However, I still don't understand why all human soldiers had not been superseded by android super-soldiers, like the Owen character, since the tech was so solidly developed?

This wasn’t a great work. However, it made-up for the author’s previous cliffhanger. It brought the second book to the soft landing the first book badly needed. This trilogy should have been a duology with the 1st and 2nd books combined. The author’s abilities shown through. In particular, with his vaguely utopian world building, his riffs on contemporary tech, the geopolitics of the Alliance, Co-Ord and Union, and his humor. However, I was a bit disappointed at the addition of the multiverse trope to the time travel. There were a bit too many popular tropes in this series already. Any one picking-up this series needs to buy the first two books together to have a satisfying experience.

Having written that, I’m looking forward to Beyond the Light Horizon (Lightspeed #3 ending the series.

An interesting world, although I'd lost track of a lot of the characters since I read the first book. It made the first bit at last slow going until I kind of remembered who everyone was.

Ken Mcleod’s first novel in this series set out a variation of his Caledonian futurism, as ever grounded in politics. An independent Scotland is part of a post-Brexit Europe, England is part of an alliance with America and so on... part one ended with the discovery of alien life, and a FTL drive. Part two (this book) picks up immediately after this, and even though I had read Beyond the Hallowed Sky (part one) the first fifty pages or so are a dense re-immersion in Mcleod’s world. From then on in, the plot takes off: we get to know more about the enigmatic alien lifeforms hidden in rocks, and more about how the FTL drive was kept hidden for decades. Mcleod’s brilliant idea from part one, that submarines could also be spaceships, is further elaborated. There’s more time with the best character, the robotic spy from the British Council. In the middle part of what is a trilogy the emphasis is on elaboration rather than completion, but the second half of the novel melds action and ideas really well while setting up the concluding part. Do read Beyond the Hallowed Sky first, as this will really make no sense unless you have, but it’s a pleasure to spend some time with these characters and worlds.
Arc provided in return for an honest review.

Good. Look for the third in May 2024.