The Sky Road
Centuries after the catastrophic Deliverance, humanity is again reaching into space. And Clovis, a young scholar working in the spaceship-construction yard, could make the difference between success and failure. For his mysterious new lover, Merrial, has seduced him into the idea of extrapolating the ship's future from the dark archives of the past. A past in which, centuries before, Myra Godwin faced the end of a different space age--her rockets redundant, her people rebellious, and her borders defenseless against the Sino-Soviet Union. As Myra appealed to the crumbling West for help, she found history turning on her own strange past--and on the terrible decisions she faces now. The Sky Road is a fireworks display, a bravura performance, and the most amazing novel yet by one of the powerful new voices in science fiction.
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6recommend
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2009–2024years
100% recommend
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What Hacker News says
- Thank you. When I think of completely different takes, I think of “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence”.
Also, these are not to be missed:
- “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road”
- “Void Star” by Zachary Mason
- “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross
- “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts
- “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj
- “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge
- “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway
- the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks
- I read and enjoyed these quite a bit, so let me add a few more to the list.
- “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road”
- “Void Star” by Zachary Mason
- “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross
- “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts
- “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj
- “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge
- “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence”
- “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway
- the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks
- There is a lot of CS hidden in the Fall Revolution series, too: The Star Fraction, The Cassini Division, The Stone Canal, and The Sky Road. All of them worth reading and reading again! I am also quite surprised that MacLeod does not get much more attention! Such a brilliant author!
Want to read about a character hacking itself out of a virtual reality? An assault rifle with a built-in AI that refuses to kill? MacLeod has lots of surprising ideas and knows how to tell a convincing story.
Not affiliated, just a fan! :)
- Engines of Light I thought was a bit overblown, although it's got some really nice bits in it. The Fall Revolution series is amazing --- hugely fun despite being politically literate, and I find it particularly impressive how The Cassini Division and The Stone Canal portray the same society from diametrically opposed perspectives, and convincingly both ways. Plus all his books are a refreshing change from the overwhelming libertarianism-uber-alles majority of SF.
(Incidentally, my father lives in Lochcarron, where most of the action is set in The Sky Road. We can see the island where they shoot down a bomber with a nuclear RPG from his window.)
_Learning the World_ I totally agree with you. It's superb. And it's got alien space bats in it!
- Speaking of science fiction, I've just been rereading Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution [0] series. Great stuff, and I totally agree with Kim Stanley Robinson's assessment: "He is writing revolutionary SF. A nova has appeared in our sky."
[0] The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, and The Sky Road.
- Ian McDonald's _Brasyl_ is up there. Hard to find but worth it. Does suffer from the "quantum effects are magical pixie dust" disease but this can be overlooked.
Charlie Stross, _Glasshouse_. Yes, _Halting State_ is good too, but in _Glasshouse_ Stross manages to get his temptation to wink at the reader under control and as a result writes a classic. Has a funny throwaway bit about DRM, too: "For some reason the ancients encrypted all their records and threw away all the keys, that's why we don't know anything about them..."
Ken MacLeod, _The Star Fraction_/_The Cassini Division_/_The Stone Canal_/_The Sky Road_ (Fall Revolution Series). Yes, there sure are a lot of Trotskyists! in! Spaaaaaace! but there's also serious exploration of how technological change affects social structures on the personal and political level. Overview from Reason magazine http://reason.com/archives/2000/11/01/anarchies-states-and-u...
and that's just things that unambiguously classify as SF. If you make things a little broader, then you can include novels like the 2008 Hugo winner, _The Yiddish Policeman's Union_, which is classic Michael Chabon applied to alt history.
