The Sky Road: Book Four: The Fall Revolution Series: A Fall Revolution Novel (Fall Revolutions Series) [Paperback]

In the sequence that started with The Star Fraction, MacLeod has created a future where the crucial historical event is left-wing students arguing about anarchism in the 70s. On this turns the destruction and renaissance of civilisation, here and elsewhere in the human galaxy. In his fourth book The Sky Road he productively fills in some of the gaps. This is the story of Myra, Trot turned entrepreneur, whose nuclear deterrence-for-hire is so crucial to the event known by some as the Fall and others as the Deliverance. It is also the story of young Clovis, part-time worker in the yard building the first spaceship for centuries, part-time scholar trying to find out what Myra the Deliverer was really like. MacLeod's quirky and intelligent take on the world of power politics--the paradoxes that arise when ideology is made praxis--and his charmingly cynical gift for engaging and engaged protagonists, are something to which the SF audience has become used. What this book also has is a profound sense of the beauty of a simpler and stiller world; MacLeod's real gift is his capacity to see all sides of a question, even when he is sure of the answer. --Roz Kaveney

In the sequence that started with The Star Fraction, MacLeod has created a future where the crucial historical event is left-wing students arguing about anarchism in the 70s. On this turns the destruction and renaissance of civilisation, here and elsewhere in the human galaxy. In his fourth book The Sky Road he productively fills in some of the gaps. This is the story of Myra, Trot turned entrepreneur, whose nuclear deterrence-for-hire is so crucial to the event known by some as the Fall and others as the Deliverance. It is also the story of young Clovis, part-time worker in the yard building the first spaceship for centuries, part-time scholar trying to find out what Myra the Deliverer was really like. MacLeod's quirky and intelligent take on the world of power politics--the paradoxes that arise when ideology is made praxis--and his charmingly cynical gift for engaging and engaged protagonists, are something to which the SF audience has become used. What this book also has is a profound sense of the beauty of a simpler and stiller world; MacLeod's real gift is his capacity to see all sides of a question, even when he is sure of the answer. (Roz Kaveney, AMAZON.CO.UK )

MacLeod is up there with Banks and Hamilton as one of the British scifi authors you absolutely have to read (SFX )

'He is writing revolutionary SF ... a nova has appeared in our sky'

'This man's going to be a major writer'

Set hundreds of years in the future, THE SKY ROAD is the astonishing story of the dawn of a new space age, from the most exciting British SF author to have emerged in recent years.

Centuries after its catastrophic Deliverance, humanity is again reaching into space. And one young scholar working in the space ship yard, Clovis colha Gree, could make the difference between success and failure. For his mysterious 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 defenceless against the Sino-Soviet Union. As Myra appealed to the falling empires of the West for help, she found history turning on her own dubious past - and on her present decisions. Decisions which, centuries later, will determine the future of the new space age. Merrial's people, the itinerant computer engineers, know this. And they know that the truth they seek lies within the secret files left by Myra Godwin.

Since graduating from Glasgow University in 1976, Ken MacLeod has worked as a computer analyst in Edinburgh. He now writes full-time.