This is the third and final book in MacLeod’s space opera trilogy, and it’s so good that I wish the series went on for at least half a dozen more books.
We’re talking proper space opera — huge space ships, political intrigue, mysterious aliens, funny aliens, faster than light travel and all that good stuff. It’s MacLeod’s best books since his first few when he arrived on the scene and everybody went “WHOA”. They’re also quite old fashioned in a way: The emphasis is definitely on the science fiction and not so much on, well, the rest.
As much as I enjoy the Expanse novels — they also had all the good stuff on the list above — they spent a lot of time on delineating how every character had their own separate traumas to get through, and we also spend an entire novel on a dirt planet listening to farmers squabble, and we had important plot developments that were about a teenager being mad at his mom, and… What I’m saying is that that series had a lot of boring stuff mixed in with the fun stuff.
These three books are just the fun stuff. There’s not a single page that’s boring, and the universe presented is so interesting that you just want to spend more time in it to explore it.
That’s not so say that it’s without its problems. The main problem is that there’s a lot of… how to put this… incredibly stupid things happening. It doesn’t matter when you’re reading the books, because they’re so much fun to read, but if you sit down and start thinking about “uhm… why did they have an unstable habitat over Venus powered by a nuclear engine that had a ‘fail safe’ mode that meant that it just shut down and couldn’t be restarted and everybody dies?” then there really is no other explanation other than “they had to be stupid for the plot to happen, so there”. That one happened in the first book, and the third book was perhaps the least stupid one?
But these books are really well written on a page-to-page basis; very exciting reads.
Beyond the Light Horizon (2024) by Ken MacLeod (buy new, buy used, 4 on Goodreads)