Beyond the Hallowed Sky

I really wanted to enjoy this book. At times it reminded me a lot of a classic Peter F Hamilton story - an interesting geopolitical backdrop, an unusual alien biome to explore, some well sketched characters. Perhaps because of that, I thought I was going to get a sprawling space opera played out on a grand scale. And then just when it was starting to get good, the book ended, leaving me feel a bit let down! I think the problem is in the comparison - a truly Hamiltonian book would have been three times as long and several more plot twists along the way. Maybe at some point I'll pick up the remaining books in the series and see if it gives me what I was craving.

The technology that drives the book is the FTL Submarine. On the surface a weird combination, but Macleod does have a good justification - the geopolitical order of Macleod's world has split into three secretive factions (broadly the Commonwealth + USA, Europe, and Russia + China), and none of them want the others to notice when they send their ships to other worlds. So they load their FTL drives onto submarines and send them off to far flung star systems instead. It's not a technology that has a lot of social implications in and of itself though, it's just there.

Possibly more interesting is Macleod's vision of an AI-assisted future. Each of the three blocs has their own perspective on how AI usage should be regulated, with Europe (plus Scotland but minus the rest of the UK) choosing a path of dependence on AI planning (after some kind of Socialist Revolution called "The Rising") while the Anglosphere seems to have put more effort into building sentient robots that can pass as human. People in Europe have access to an AI helper called "Iskander" that anticipates their needs and does stuff for them. The book poses some interesting questions about human agency in the face of something that knows what you want before you ask.

Also there is some mysterious alien technology lying around. I love reading about alienness - I think there's a rich vein of introspective thought that comes out of trying to work out what it would be like to meet and interact with non-human intelligences. Here there's a bit of that, but just as it was starting to kick into gear I reached the end :(. Shame too because it could have been quite interesting.

So in summary, enjoyable but was left unsatisfied by how it finished (and a touch sceptical about some of the physics, but not a big deal).