Dark Light
Ken MacLeod
292 pages
published in 2001
This is the second novel in the Engines of Light trilogy. As such it's a direct sequel to Cosmonaut Keep and you should read that before you read Dark Light or for that matter, this review.
In Cosmonaut Keep, our heroes: Matt Cairns (one of the original cosmonauts who founded the human colony of Mingulay), Elizabeth Harkness, a biology student who helped Gregor Cairns (Matt's descendant) figure out the math needed to navigate the ship and finally Salasso the Saur, had managed to reach Matt's old ship, the Bright Star which had brought him and the other cosmonauts to the Second Sphere: the ring of involuntary human colonies established by the Gods a great many lightyears from Sol. Now they had travelled from their homeworld, Mingulay to another colony, Croatan, to start building up new, human controlled trade routes, no longer dependent on hitching rides with the space ships of the Kraken.
As was established in Cosmonaut Keep, humans weren't the only intelligent beings kidnapped from their planet by the Gods, the hyperintelligent transcended beings who live in the Oort clouds and asteroid belts of who knows how many star systems. There were also the Saur, intelligent dinosaurs as well as the giant Kraken, giant squids who control the giant spaceships which travel through the Second Sphere at the speed of light. Humans of the homo sapiens sapiens variety are only one of several humanoid species scattered through the Second Sphere and firmly on the bottom rung of the hierarchy: Gods on top, followed by the Kraken, followed by the Saurs and last the various human species. In general the various species cohabit on the same worlds, but live their lives separately.
As you may or may not know (I didn't until it was pointed out to me) "gone to Croatan" was the message the settlers of one of the first English colonies in North America left behind when they disappeared. So it comes as no surprise that the dominant human colony on Croatan lives on the continent New Virginia, centered around the capital city Rawliston. They've reached an early 20th centruy level of technology: cars, aeroplanes, radio and faxes. Coexisting with them is an older human civilisation which has made a conscious decision to remain at a stone age level of existence, but with knobs on. They have e.g balloon trains and hanggliders. Various older homonid species also inhabit the planet and significant numbers of them and the stone agers live in Rawliston. Rawliston is a democracy, with one exception, the Port Authority, responsible for dealing with the various starships that visit and which has steadily built its power.
In this heady mix, which reminded me somewhat of Latin America, our heroes land and promptly get themselves involved in the local politics, while at the same time they're also pursuing their plan to upset the Kraken monopoly on star travel of course. Not to mention that Matt is also checking out the Gods, suspecting that they're not as benevolent as tradition would have it...
There's a buzz I get only from the best science fiction --no other genre has trhe same effect on me. Dark Light gave me that buzz, that feeling of expanding horizons, that sense of wonder every sf writer strives for. As all MacLeod novels, it's absolutely brilliant.