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Engine City (Engines of Light)
 
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Engine City (Engines of Light) (Paperback)

by Ken MacLeod (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
RRP: £6.99
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Frequently Bought Together

Engine City (Engines of Light) + Dark Light (Engines of Light) + Cosmonaut Keep: Bk.1 (Engines of Light)
Price For All Three: £17.46

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Product details

  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Orbit; New edition edition (4 Sep 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1841492035
  • ISBN-13: 978-1841492032
  • Product Dimensions: 17.6 x 10.6 x 2.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 119,722 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Engine City completes Ken MacLeod's "Engines of Light" trio of sophisticated, politically astute space operas. Previous volumes were Cosmonaut Keep and Dark Light.

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.



Review

'The modern-day George Orwell' SFX, 'A hectic ride, through slaloms of audacious complexity, irreverent ingenuity and paradox as purposeful as it is playful' GUARDIAN, 'Magnificent . a series you'd be wise to follow from the start' STARBURST, 'MacLeod simply gets better and better . SF writing doesn't come more accomplished than this' STARLOG, 'A classic saga . heartily recommended' SFX '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 of SF for the more demanding reader, venturing into the effects of new technologies and ideological and political ways of thinking, elevating the novels way above the normal 'space opera' level (fun as they are). Absorbing and fascinating, I couldn't stop reading this.' THEALIENONLINE
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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
5 star:
 (1)
4 star:
 (5)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:
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1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.8 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A satisfying conclusion to an interesting trilogy., 7 Feb 2004
By WJ Davidson (Edinburgh) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Following the (mostly) planet bound political chicanery of Dark Light, Engine City returns the series to the stars.
Without giving too much away, the story expands on the 'alien threat' and the rift between Matt Cairns and Volkovs political ambitions. There is action aplenty, political intrigue and a satisfying conclusion (although one which also leaves it open for further novels to explore).

The main characters are by this time familiar and their motivations and actions are all consistent with the previous novels.
It's a sign of a good series that you care about the characters and are perhaps a little sad when the story is over and I felt that was true in this case.

One criticsm I have had of KM in previous works was that I didn't think his descriptive powers were quite up to the breadth of his imagination, however that was not the case in this novel.

Overall a good book and a good point to end the series.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A fun and readable conclusion to the series, 5 Dec 2002
This review is from: Engine City (Engines of Light) (Hardcover)
I enjoyed reading this final book in his Second Sphere series. You get a sense that the author enjoyed putting together the plot from all the SF cliches, whilst not creating a cliche SF novel. The tone has been lighter in this series than the first, and this is continued in this novel, but he avoids turning the various plots into comedy pieces.

At times the world he describes seems shallower than in his earlier books, but that is probably because he is creating new societies here, and not just future versions of our own.

It's another good novel from Ken Macleod, let's hope he'll quickly write another.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars MacLeod's weakest to date - which shows how good he is., 6 Feb 2005
Had this been a stand-alone book, i think i'd have loved it, but coming after the superb first two instalments it was a little disappointing. The action takes place some time after the end of Dark Light (in relative time anyway), but MacLeod lets the plot threads go a bit and toward the end it seems rather contrived and unsatisfactory. Surprising, as he manages timelines so well in the Fall Revolution novels, which are far more complex.

Still, well worth reading.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars British SF at its best
The thing I like about Macleod is that his science is at least beleivable, if mankind does ever get to the stars it is more likely we will take the MacLeod route than by driving a... Read more
Published 24 months ago by Parsifal

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad but not as good the preceeding titles
I found engine city to be reasonably entertaining and intelligent. There were some exciting and pleasingly humurous sections along with MacLeod's usual skillful style. Read more
Published on 6 Aug 2007 by K. Elliott

4.0 out of 5 stars A quite satisfying conclusion to a splendid series
This concluding novel in the Engines Of Light series just doesn't quite stand on it's own meriets, but should be read as the last part of the series. Read more
Published on 4 April 2003 by Neal C. Reynolds

2.0 out of 5 stars Engine City - a disappointment
I agree with an earlier reviewer of "Cosmonaut Keep" who complained about the difficulty of keeping up with Macleod's plot lines. Read more
Published on 19 Feb 2003 by John N. L. Morrison

4.0 out of 5 stars Overall, a good conclusion to the Trilogy
Overall, a good conclusion to the Trilogy, with a definitive ending (or is it?) which ties up most of the threads. Read more
Published on 5 Feb 2003 by Bill Bolton

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