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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Good Threads, Poor Cloth, 11 Mar 2004
Although crammed with fascinating ideas and livened by moments of humour and irony, Newton's Wake disappointed me. It is by far the weakest of his stories so far. Why? It's hard to put a finger on it. Perhaps it's because the events are episodic and disconnected in time and place. Scenes of conflict and war bubble up with little preparation or justification, seemingly just to provide some action. Perhaps it is because few characters are developed beyond charicature (Winters and Calder, the folk singers, and Higgens being notable exceptions). Perhaps it is because the societies and systems of the future are quite 'cartoon'-like. The story is also strangely lacking in visual texture and description - my overriding impression is of drab and barren moorland.Probably, it is a combination of all of these elements, meaning that Newton's Wake is an interesting essay, and very entertaining in episodes, but fails as a story. Still, that being said, it's better than 90% of the junk of the science fiction shelves at the moment, which fail in every way.
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25 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
A Bad Scottish Joke, 7 Feb 2005
By A Customer
I bought this book because Iain M Banks gave it a rave blurb. I'm sorry to say I won't be doing that again. MacLeod's future feels forced into conformity with his late 20th-century sense of humor. He's designed whole future cultures as the punchlines to 20th century jokes. Glasgow thugs in space! Ha ha ha! Wait until you hear about the multiplanetary culture that originated in the USA: they're called America Offline! Stop it, MacLeod, you're killing me! Lacking respect for his own story, this author constantly uses his characters like hand puppets to make conspiratorial gestures at the reader: nudge nudge, wink wink, they have musicals in the future about Bush and bin Laden! Maybe some people find this kind of thing amusing; I find it boring and silly. I'm giving the book two stars instead of one because its imbecilic vision is tolerably well executed.
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16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
Law of diminishing returns, 3 Jun 2005
Oh Ken, Ken, Ken... Your early work promised so much. You created a uniquely British, nay Scottish, politically-informed cyberpunk. I learnt more about anarchist history and ideals from reading The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division than I have before or since... You created a beautiful, diverse, realistic, Balkanised future as an antidote for the monolithic uniform utopias of Star Trek. And then you wrote The Sky Road, which was... okay. And then you wrote Cosmonaut Keep, which was actually (and i whisper it almost inaudibly) not very good. So not very good that i didn't bother getting either of the follow ups. Then you wrote Newton's Wake and i thought, Aha, a New Start (snigger). Lets give this one a go... Gah. What happened? In the early days your puns were endearing, your chapter titles revolutionary (snigger) your programming in-jokes laugh-out-loud funny. No more. Newton's Wake simply annoyed me. The characters were annoying. The obscure plot was annoying. The sodding gags were annoying. I thought you couldn't get more daft than pot-smoking aliens. You did. Bad show.
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