Overhead, Quietly, Without Any Fuss:

In Ken Macleod's fiction, the cities and societies are living, breathing characters at least as important as those embodied in flesh and blood. In Engine City, the concluding volume of the Engines of Light series, political theories joust and economic models wrestle against a backdrop of high-tech space operatic war. Such goings-on lend his novels a feeling of depth, of meaning, that some other comtemporary offerings lack. They've also given me a long-term inferiority complex, and a nagging worry that I've never quite managed to get it.

I'm not an expert in political theory. There have been times when I've watched my friends ridicule libertarians or anarcho-capitalists or (even) socialists and had only the vaguest notion of what all these terms mean, or where, exactly, the boundaries between them lie. And when reading Ken Macleod's novels, I've often had the same feeling. I can see the societies in question without feeling that I really understand them.

With Engine City, I felt that change. Maybe it's because I'm another year older since I read the last of Macleod's novels; maybe it's just that seven is enough of his books to finally be getting what it is he's on about. Maybe Engine City is just better.

I'm leaning towards 'just better', myself. As a series, I must admit to being mildly disappointed with the first two volumes of Engines of Light; whilst good, they never felt as detailed or as vivid as the Fall Revolution stories that preceded them. Engine City, on the other hand, is nothing short of superb, and runs The Stone Canal close for placing as my favourite Macleod. After a handy refresher course in the cosmology of and heirarchies of intellect in the Engines... universe, the novel starts off at a brisk pace and accelerates from there, without ever feeling clumsy or forced. And the resoundingly appropriate ending, complete with its killer last line, merely leaves you hungry for more.

(The background is too complicated and ingenious to summarise here, but for those only familiar with the Fall Revolution novels perhaps the characterisation 'Ken does aliens' will be tantalisingly sufficient.)

Themes present in the previous two novels - principally the roles of longevity, space travel and aliens on the development of societies - suddenly feel more purposeful and more rounded. This is aided enormously by the introduction of the unsettling and ambiguous Multipliers, which represent the intersection of the three novums. Moreover, Engine City is an enormous amount of fun, helped by the sheer exuberance of many of the concepts introduced. My favourite such is a spoiler for the closing chapters of the book, but Matt Cairns' campaign of 'guerilla ontology' comes in a close second.

In a world of bloated epics, Ken Macleod's novels are appealingly focused, intelligent and insightful. And whilst the reader undoubtedly gains from a familiarity with the previous two entries in the series, Engine City is still comprehensible as a standalone story. In other words: if you've never read Macleod, now's the time to start.