Engine City (The Engines of Light, Book 3) (Hardcover)

~ Ken MacLeod (Author) "THE JUMP IS instantaneous..." (more)
Key Phrases: lightspeed jump, gravity skiff, lightspeed drive, New Babylon, Bright Star Cultures, Nova Terra (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The final book in MacLeod's Engines of Light trilogy (Cosmonaut Keep; Dark Light) starts a bit slowly, its plotline divided among several different planets, but soon gathers steam. The Second Sphere, a volume of human-occupied interstellar space far from Earth, was established millennia ago by highly advanced aliens for largely inscrutable reasons and has been the home of several different human species, not to mention sentient dinosaurs and giant squid (aka krakens), ever since. Indeed, humanity has had to adjust to being the bottom species on the totem pole, since the saurs and krakens are technologically more sophisticated than us and control all interstellar travel. Even more overwhelming are the space-dwelling intelligences known only as the Gods. Now, however, a group of renegade cosmonauts with their own improvised starship has upset the balance of this complex society. In addition, the Multipliers, an alien race who've been interfering in the lives of Earth's species since prehistoric times, have returned to human space, offering a peculiar form of immortality and challenging the Gods for control. MacLeod (Dark Light) includes several of his trademark political debates and these are as engaging as always. The Multipliers, eight-legged creatures whose appendages subdivide to the point where they can manipulate matter on the atomic level, are fascinating and very alien indeed. The novel doesn't stand well on its own, but should please fans of the series as well as readers who appreciate hard SF with a political bent.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

One of the most unorthodox contemporary sf writers here concludes something quite orthodox--a trilogy. What's more, The Engines of Light is a trilogy about human evolution, a theme that was well-worn in sf when MacLeod's parents were in diapers. But not to despair, readers who love MacLeod the quirkster. Mingulay, a planet in the center of the now-menaced Second Sphere, may be 10,000 years from MacLeod's home in Scotland, but his edgy satire of what human folly gets people and civilizations into remains as sharp as ever. His alien invaders seem neither particularly alien nor even odd, compared to some human cultures in the Sphere and even on Mingulay, and even gross political issues manage to get drawn into the human debate over whether to accept the gift of immortality and what the motives of those offering it might be. Perhaps this book will be only marginally accessible to those who didn't start reading the trilogy with Cosmonaut Keep (2001), so have that and Dark Light (2002) handy. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (February 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 076530502X
• ISBN-13: 978-0765305022
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,635,129 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a strong finish...., February 27, 2004

By	ThePGH (Florida, USA.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Engine City (The Engines of Light, Book 3) (Mass Market Paperback)

Ken MacLoeds books are usually a complex but ultimately satisfying read. The first two books of this trilogy fitted into that description but this third book, Engine City, missed the mark. I found myself skipping through pages which is something I usually never do. It seemed like this was a very disjointed finish to a story that had started out really well in books one and two.

I look forward to his next work...although may not a trilogy.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An unusual ending for an unusual species, August 16, 2003

By	Samer T Ismail "SF & classical music fan" (Danbury, CT) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In retrospect, I suspect I should *not* have been surprised by the ending of the book; in a sense, the ending--and the coda which follows it--were set up in the very first book in the trilogy, "Cosmonaut Keep." The central theme of this book appears to be irony, from first page to last.

MacLeod has created a bizarre universe, populated with many different creatures, including saurs, krakens, selkies, and, perhaps the most alien of all, the eight-legged Multipliers. There's a lot of intriguing ideas jammed in here.

Unfortunately, all those ideas, in a book this short, mean that a lot of characters get short shrift. Likewise, the book isn't long enough to stand on its own; why certain characters behave the way they do doesn't really make sense unless you've read the previous two books. Thus, the series ends leaving a lot of questions (not the least of which is why the book is written in the present tense when, and only when, Matt Cairns is the viewpoint character).

All in all, though, if you've read the first two books, you'll probably want to read this one just to see how it ends. If you haven't, start with "Cosmonaut Keep" and "Dark Light" before reading this one.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid conclusion to a neat SF trilogy, March 7, 2003

By	Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

_Engine City_ concludes Ken MacLeod's second novel series, together called Engines of Light. In the first two novels (_Cosmonaut Keep_ and _Dark Light_) we learned that an asteroid passing near Earth in the mid-21st Century contained intelligent nano-bacteria, who collectively had the intelligence of a god. These beings made available to an international team of cosmonauts a starship, which they took hundreds of thousands of light years to a planet called Mingulay. There they learned that they were only the latest of many waves of colonization of that area of the galaxy, apparently all at the doing of the gods. This "second sphere" was inhabited by humans from ancient Babylon, for example, and by humans from more recent historical eras, and by intelligent dinosaurs, and by other hominids such as pithkies (Australopithecus). Travel in the Second Sphere is dominated by starships run by intelligent giant squid (the Krakens) and by the saurs, but the new Cosmonauts have a starship, if they can only figure out how to navigate it. In the second book, having learned to navigate the Bright Star, they travel to nearby Croatan (home of the lost Roanoke colony), and there the politically active, long-lived, cosmonauts naughtily foment a rebellion, while also contacting the local gods, and learning some scary secrets about the gods, and about other 8-legged aliens.

In _Engine City_ MacLeod works diligently to knit together the various threads of the first two books. In fact, at times the book seems too busy, too full of new ideas only a few of which would have sufficed for a full novel. By the end, however, he does draw things to a fairly satisfying conclusion (only to blow it up again in a clever SF-referential last chapter -- not, though, a harbinger of further books in the series but rather something of a wink (or perhaps grimace) at the reader).

At any rate _Engine City_ involves the Bright Star and other new starships establishing a new trading culture, threatening the established hegemony of the kraken-controlled ships of Nova Babylonia. One of the most cynical of the old cosmonauts makes his way to Nova Babylonia to foment a new rebellion, on essentially Stalinist terms. The sinister 8-legged aliens turn up, offering immortality, but at what cost? The gods are provoked. A terrible war is threatened. In general, pretty neat stuff, but I felt the book was a bit rushed, and a bit too packed. I'd rather have focussed more on some of the individual characters. Still, MacLeod has definitely met his obligations to the series reader by answering all the questions he earlier raised.

Not a great book but a good one. I continue to eagerly buy MacLeod's new books as they appear.