Matt Cairns is a 21st-century outlaw Programmer who takes on the shady jobs no one else will touch. Against his better judgment, he accepts an assignment to crack the Marshall Titov, a top-secret orbital station operated by the European Space Agency. But what Matt will discover there will propel him on an extraordinary and quite unexpected journey.

Gregor Cairns is an exobiology student and descendant of one of Terra Nova's first families. Hopelessly infatuated with a lovely young trader's daughter, he is unaware that his research partner, Elizabeth, has fallen in love with him. Together, Gregor and Elizabeth confront the great work his family began three centuries earlier-to rediscover the secret of interstellar travel.

Ranging from a gritty near-future Earth to a distant alien world, Cosmonaut Keep is contemporary science fiction at its highest level, a visionary epic filled with daring individuals seeking a place for themselves in a vast, complex, and enigmatic universe.

Amazon.com Review
Like a British--specifically, Scottish--counterpart of Bruce Sterling, Ken MacLeod is an SF author who has thought hard about politics and delights in making unlikely alternatives plausible, grippingly readable, and often downright funny.

Cosmonaut Keep swaps between two timelines whose characters share the ultimate goal of interstellar travel. In an uncertain future on the far world of Mingulay, human colonists live in the title's ancient, alien-built Keep--coexisting with reptilian "saurs," trading with visiting ships piloted by krakens, and hiding their laborious "Great Work" of developing human-guided navigation between the stars.

Meanwhile, alternate chapters present a mid-21st-century Earth whose EU is (to America's horror) Russian-dominated with a big red star in the middle of its flag. Rumors of alien contact abound, and computer whiz kid Matt Cairns finds himself carrying a data disk of unknown origin that offers antigravity and a space drive.

Clearly, the later storyline's Gregor Cairns is Matt's descendant. There are ingenious connections and surprises, with witty resonances between their wild careers, their travels, and their bumpy love lives. The foreground action adventure points to a bigger picture and a master plan known only to the godlike hive-minds who built the "Second Sphere" of interstellar culture, and who regard traditional SF dreams of unlimited human expansion through space as precisely equivalent to floods of e-mail spam polluting the tranquil galactic net.

Cosmonaut Keep opens MacLeod's new SF sequence, Engines of Light. It's highly entertaining and intelligent, promising more good things to come. --David Langford

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 27 reviews)

Not Free SF Reader

This novel has two threads. The first a near future thriller revolving around secret spaceflight technology and contact with aliens, and the dangers inherent in this activity. The politics of who should control such tech and information also make up an important part.

The other stream is set in the reasonably distant future on a planet that actually has humans coexisting with aliens. One particular wealthy family is looking into technological research on a long term scale, trying to improve their situation.

September 03, 2007

Good series, but something's always missing.

I think it's called an end. Each book of both series tends to fade away at the end and the last book of both series don't seem to pull it together any better.

That said, the topics are all great reading, the characters all work well, the talent is clearly there. I think it's just a stylistic decision not to wrap the stories up (I didn't say neatly) that leaves me wondering a week or month later if I had actually finished reading them.

Odd. I will still read everything this author puts out there anyway. Maybe I'll develop a taste for the case of the quiet denoument in time. Or out of it.
November 10, 2006

Never judge a book by its cover

This paperback edition of "Cosmonaut Keep" has a beautiful cover. The depiction of a hovering city-sized spaceship is rendered in cool blues and accented with brilliant light shining between dark clouds. In fact, looking back it was the beauty of this cover that first caught my eye in the bookstore, and lent weight to the generic description blurb on the back.

Alas, as they say, you should never judge a book by its cover. "Cosmonaut Keep" is a truly mediocre book. About the best thing I can say about it is that it never crossed the line into being actually bad. I had the strange experience of starting to wish, halfway through, that it would get just a little bit worse so I could conclude it wasn't worth finishing, but it managed to hang in there.

The book is split into two plots separated in time and converging at the end. But neither plot is very interesting. I'm not sure exactly where to lay the blame for this, since I've read books in the past with very simillar plots that managed to be entertaining, and it's undeniable that Macleod is a competent writer. In the end, I think he simply failed to create characters that I felt were real, much less could be sympathetic to. It is almost as if his main emotional attachment was to the neat plot and background story he had created, and not to the people he was showing us.

I also have a quibble with the universe that Macleod has created. It was perfectly acceptable in years past for sci-fi authors to create near-future scenarios where the world was divided between Soviet and American spheres of influence, or where one had conquered the other, and so on. It was a perogative of the Cold War, the same way that spy thrillers were always permitted to summon up a KGB agent at any point where it would help the plot. But those days are long gone, and this book was published in the year 2000. What could possibly excuse an author who pretends that events from 1991 on simply never took place, and that in the future the EU will be under Soviet domination? For me it was unnecesary and annoying, and made it more difficult to do the traditional work of a sci-fi reader; suspending my disbelief.
October 10, 2006

Skillfully interweaves the personal and the political in a tapestry of transcendental posthumanity

Cosmonaut Keep is the first in a new series by Ken MacLeod, who wrote The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division. As in those earlier works, this novel skillfully interweaves the personal and the political in a tapestry of transcendental posthumanity.

MacLeod again uses two narratives spanning an unknown amount of time to tell his story, and this conceit (while a bit confusing at first, at least in this novel) works. The "present" narrative takes place in the near-future, albeit in an alternate world where the EU is part of a larger Communist bloc and where alien technology, specifically a starship and drive, are being discovered. It follows one Matt Cairns as he makes his way from Edinburgh, Scotland to Area 51 in New Mexico to a space station and the future. The "future" narrative takes place on a world called Mingulay, which is inhabited by humans and saurs, intelligent descendents of the terrestrial dinosaurs. (Other forms of intelligent life in the novel include the kraken, superintelligent spacefaring squid, and god-like colonies of microorganisms that inhabit millions of asteroids in the solar system. There we follow one Gregor Cairns in his quest to solve the Great Game---to discover the secrets of interplanetary navigation believed to be possessed by his ancestor, Matt.

If the rest of the series is as fascinating as this volume, then reading it will be a real joy. Once again, MacLeod shows himself as one of the smarter writers in contemporary SF and speculative fiction.
July 09, 2006

Those whom the gods would destroy...

This is not an easy book to get into, there is an initally confusing split storyline and seemingly bizarre shifts in narrative and time (without the usual chapter markers to ease the readers transitions), but these are all clues to an unfolding and complex drama well worth a few chapters of disorientation.
In the vein of William Gibson's Neuromancer, we are shown a cyberpunk distopia on the verge of a transformative shift or it's own destruction, but peopled by characters both interesting and familier enough to be our guides (rather like Larry Niven's Ring World series); as well as a front row seat to Humanity's awareness of the true nature of the Universe and our relationship to it... and it's not a comfortable revelation either.
As the pieces begin to fall into place, the book becomes a real treat to read and the shifts in place and time fuel the sense of urgency and tension as events lead you to an all too sudden but satisfying ending... thankfully, this is only the first book in what promisies to be a fantastic and challenging trilogy, a must have for my library, to be sure.
September 08, 2005

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Dark Light (The Engines of Light, Book 2)
by Ken MacLeod

Engine City (The Engines of Light, Book 3)
by Ken MacLeod

Old Man's War
by John Scalzi

Newton's Wake : A Space Opera
by Ken MacLeod

The Cassini Division (Fall Revolution)
by Ken MacLeod