Ken MacLeod: Newton's Wake

Newton's Wake is a space opera (it says so on the cover). The Carlyles, a band of entrepreneurs (or gangsters) who control a profitable wormhole network discover a planet with some rather interesting artifacts. Too bad it's already inhabited by a lost fragment of humankind. A simple combat archeology operation turns into a huge mess that threatens the whole Carlyle family business.

It gets rather complicated in the end, and it's kind of funny how this book really has no bad guys or good guys - or at least I'm finding it hard to decide who are who. There's quite a bit of action, some pretty cool futuristic technology, plenty of rather entertaining comedy (though that seems to divide opinions pretty wildly according to the Amazon reviews) and even though the purpose of it all is kind of hard to follow at times, I still found the book a good read.

Granted, at some point I thought Newton's Wake was really, really good, but in the end it's not - it's just good. The ending, in particular, didn't please me quite as thoroughly as I would've wanted. Someone said the end of the book felt vague, and I think that's pretty close to how I felt. It was worth reading, however, as Newton's Wake certainly has some pretty wild highlights. I was particularly fond of the search engines. [ Newton's Wake at Amazon.co.uk ] [ Newton's Wake at LibraryThing ]