Engine City (Engines of Light) (Hardcover)

MacLeod has lots of fun with UFO conspiracy theories, since here the saurian-descended "Alien Greys" with their antigravity saucers actually exist. So do hairy Bigfoot-like primates, sea-dwelling selkie folk, and other legends. Planetary fossil records are a misleading mess, thanks to tampering by the "gods".

These gods are hive-mind intellects, vast, cool and irritable, occupying comets and asteroids. They have long been transplanting intelligent species across space, and playing them off against one another, just to keep the noise down--the dreadful racket of radio broadcasts and space exploration. "Their first and last commandment is: do not disturb us."

The mixture of human and other races dumped in the Second Sphere, a far-off galactic region, is up to potentially disturbing activities: an accelerating growth of technology and interstellar trade. Are rumours of octopod alien "Multipliers" mere disinformation, or are these the Gods'-appointed nemesis for the human-led Bright Star Cultures and their commercial empire? Some long-lived cosmonauts, surviving from book one, hope for peaceful diplomatic relations. One, an unreconstructed Russian veteran, urges a massive arms programme on the world of Nova Terra. Everyone, but everyone, is in for surprises.

The twisty narrative has many cheery asides, such as the naming of a flotilla of human-built UFOs: "Matt's suggested names (Rectal Probe, Up Yours, Probably Venus, Strange Light, No Defence Significance) were all rejected..." Or a saurian's patient explanation that antigravity was useless for building their equivalent of the Pyramids, which required enormous ramps of close-packed earth, miles of rope, and tens of thousands of workers: "But when you tell people that, they don't believe you."

Towards the finale on Nova Terra, events are complicated by heavy weaponry, alien symbiosis, a programme of "guerrilla ontology" featuring literal "Men in Black" and devastating intervention by one of the gods. For excellent self-defensive reasons, the Bright Star Cultures class the killing of Gods (theicide) as a heinous crime. The provocation, however, is great...

A highly enjoyable conclusion to a fizzy, fast-moving but persistently intelligent trilogy. --David Langford

Review
'Ken's books are always a delight to read .I heartily recommend the entire series to anyone who has not yet begun them. As anyone who has read Ken's earlier work, such as the STAR FRACTION or the CASSINI DIVISION will know he creates excellent novels full

Third in MacLeod's Engines of Light series (Dark Light, 2002, etc.). The Second Sphere lies a hundred thousand light-years in the future, colonized over millions of years and populated by descendants of terrestrial creatures: the dinosaurian saurs, the giant-squid kraken, and various hominids. Two hundred years earlier, a starship arrived from Earth; among its cosmonauts were the immortals Matt Cairns and Grigory Volkov. From a dying god, one of countless cometary intelligences composed of nanobacteria, they learned to expect an imminent invasion by non-terrestrial hostiles. Volkov makes himself dictator of planet Nova Terra, decreeing intricate space defenses capable of blasting any approaching aliens. Matt and his associates, however, go looking for the aliens and encounter them first. Far from hostile, the Multipliers eagerly join with Matt and friends; they delight in synthesizing things on a molecular level, so there will be no more need of factories or trade. Tiny Multiplier offspring can enter human bodies and rearrange genes to render everyone immortal and infuse them with a portion of the vast Multiplier racial memory. Thus are the Bright Star Cultures born. The real enemies are the crusty, ancient gods, who can't abide bustle and noise and who intended for humans and Multipliers to destroy one another. Volkov, meanwhile, blasts an unsuspecting Multiplier fleet and prepares for a showdown with Matt and the Bright Stars. Rich, inventive, intelligent, and fascinating: so unorthodox is MacLeod that it often seems as if he's pursuing complexity as an end in itself. (Kirkus Reviews)

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