Review of “Newton’s Wake” by Ken Macleod

A post-singularity novel set in the ruins of weapons of mass confusion

In “Newton’s Wake” Ken Macleod paints a vision of a post-singularity world where heavily armed teams of combat archaeologists tries to salvage abandoned and sometimes just dormant posthuman war-machines. Reckless rapture fuckers interfaces whit high-tech artefacts they cannot possibly comprehend, in order to seek out the very edge between the transhuman and the posthuman. Often they return from their trips irrevocably changed, carrying the scars of superscience in their minds as well as on their bodies. Descendants of Glasgow mobsters are fighting skirmishes with high-tech samurai. Conflict spirals out of control as the fragile balanced of power between strange political factions shatters. How did humanity end up in this brave new world?

The timeline of this future is quite complex but it goes something like this:
In the late 21rst century, world war III set of a singularity driven by emergent military artificial intelligence. Quickly, humanity found themselves fighting a losing battle against the AI war machines, and uploaded posthuman intellects, for control over Earth. The population of Earth was decimated into less than a billion people, some of which fled out into the asteroid belt and the outer planets. There, exiled from earth, that particular shred of humanity splintered into two factions, Remainders who wanted to take the fight back to the AI enemy on earth and Reformers who saw the struggle as futile and wanted to flee in arks across the stars to distant planets. As the conflict between these two factions became increasingly violent the space-diaspora inadvertently set off another singularity, of a more benign kind, which resulted in the minds of both factions being forcibly uploaded by a different kind of posthuman AI:s. The human minds were then beamed to the planet of Eurydice where the same kind of posthuman AI:s reassembled human bodies from scratch and downloaded the minds into them, after building a high tech, fully automated post-scarcity industrial civilization for them. Soon after this the posthumans and the AI:s transcended to a higher plane, both on earth and on Eurydice, leaving only dormant and semi-sentient sub-systems in control of the husks of posthuman technology. The hard rapture happened, and humanity was left behind in tatters. Back on earth, surviving shreds of civilization managed to scavenge enough posthuman technology to learn to operate abandoned interstellar wormhole gates and to reverse engineer faster than light propulsion.

Hundreds of years later, the following factions from earth share an uneasy balance of power over known space:

· The Caryle Clan; a trade cartel descended from Glasgow mobsters. They control most of wormhole gateways, charging a hefty fee for interplanetary travel and transport. They’re big on combat archaeology and reverse engineers any posthuman tech they find adjacent to the gateways.

· The Knights of Enlightenment: An Asian faction with eastern philosophy approach to posthuman technology. They practice a lot of yoga, martial arts, biofeedback and tantric sex which gives them near superhuman physical abilities and a long natural life span. Their culture turns their men into fearsome high-tech bushido warriors. They shun mind backups since their physicists have proven that everyone will be reborn in the next cycle of the universe.

· Demokratische Kommunistbund or perhaps Democratic Korea: Hardcore space communists. They’re big on Juche, or economic self-reliance within their trading block. They usually settle in bio-domes on planets without atmospheres and specialize in strip-mining.

· America Offline: Descended from remnants of America who shunned the internet and therefore survived the Hard Rapture. They’re skilled terraformers with a rural culture. They worship Jesus Koresh and are considered luddites by the other factions.

The novel begins when a team of combat archaeologists led by Lucinda Caryle re-opens a wormhole to Eurydice. There they find a sparsely populated, yet technologically superior, society of fellow human beings, but they also awake something ancient, which has laid dormant in the posthuman ruins adjacent to the wormhole gate. Something ancient which starts to build up an army of war-robots for an unclear purpose. The promise of revolutionary posthuman technology on Eurydice threatens the fragile balance of power between the factions as they scramble their troops and frantically use whatever military and diplomatic means available to acquire it.

Wow, there’s so much stuff compressed and distilled into this book! The factions are like great sketch, granting the potential for awesome world building, but despite Mr Macleods intense language he somehow fails in fleshing them out. There’s so much stuff shoved into the novel that there’s not enough room for depth. I’d love it if he revisited this universe in a second book. The language is merciless with the technobabble and punishing in its lack of info-dumps. In many works of science fiction, including other novels by Mr Macleod, I like that kind of narrative style, it can make the world seem more real and it can preserve the flow to the story. However, in “Newton’s Wake” the author takes this style a bit too far and I say that as a dedicated fan of the singularity sci-fi genre. I still don’t quite know what a search engine is (Is it some kind of armoured personnel carriage?). The narrative style weaves a loosely coherent plotline and you need to pay a lot of attention in order to not lose track of it. Nevertheless, the dramaturgic curve is fine. The characters are reasonably well written but not amazing. I find Lucinda Caryle, one of the POW protagonists quite unsympathetic which makes it hard to empathize with her. There’s a really good description of what it feels like to have AI emotions somewhere in the novel. That alone makes it worth reading. The book also covers some important sci-fi themes, the most central of which is perhaps various metaphysical and emotional questions over uploaded and digitalized minds.

“Newton’s wake” is conceptually brilliant, but the execution of those oh so brilliant concepts is merely good. I give it 7.5 of 10 weapons of mass confusion. It’s an interesting novel, but not the best in the post-singularity sub-genre, for example “The Corporation Wars: Dissidence”, by the same author, is better. Nevertheless, “Newton’s wake” solidifies Ken Macleod’s place among the usual suspects of this sub-genre. I’m talking about the visionary and highly esteemed names of Hannu Rajaniemi , Greg Egan and Charles Stross. You can definitely feel that Ken and Charles are friends in this novel, their stories have a similar vibe and evidently there has been plenty of cross pollination going on between the two of them.