roatan is a world of great and strange diversity. One of a group of planets known as the Second Sphere, it is has been populated by entities known to some on the planet as gods, as the Powers Above. These gods (actually clusters of trillions of intelligent entities that reside, bacteria-like, in comets and asteroids) have infused Croatan with all kinds of animal life from various periods of the planet Earth's history. Dinosaurs and their descendants, the saurs (known to some, historically, as "Gray aliens"), share the planet with humans and some of their hominid ancestors, as well as with the krakens, the intelligent descendants of giant squids, who, until very recently, were the only ones who could pilot the light-speed-drive starships that periodically bring supplies and new technologies to Croatan. But it's the arrival of the starship Bright Star that truly throws this world into upheaval.
Two of the Bright Star's crew (also Second Sphere abductees), a 21st-century human named Matt Cairns and a (bit of an iconoclastic) saur named Salasso, have decided that they want to seek out these "gods" and find out exactly the reason why they have taken all of these beings to the Second Sphere. But the crew's plans get derailed when the all-too-powerful Port Authority of Rawliston, the mercantilist, "civilized" capitalist society of Croatan, impounds their ship on quite questionable grounds.
The ship's crew then have to go about rallying the support of friends old and new in order to take on the Port Authority, to negotiate the maze and quagmire that are the cultures, the socioeconomics, the politics of Croatan. It will take everyone from the members of one of the planet's wealthy, ancient trading families, to old cosmonaut comrades, to heathens (members of one of the planet's pre-industrial societies known as The Vale) in order to accomplish their none-too-modest goals. But can the delicate balance that holds this world together handle such actions without falling apart or blowing up?
Fascinating and imperfect in its complexity
Dark Light, the second book in the latest trilogy from acclaimed Scottish author Ken MacLeod, is a work that is full of engaging elements that never quite come together in a terribly satisfactory manner, given all the potential they suggest. MacLeod is by now known for the deep political content and the appealing and intelligent eclecticism of his writing (Salon.com has drolly and aptly referred to him, among other things, as "the greatest living Trotskyist libertarian cyberpunk science-fiction humorist"), yet this, his latest offering, while possessing a number of brilliant passages, turns and characterizations, seems to suffer from a bit of system overload.
The "action" that occupies roughly the first half of the novel simply doesn't, unfortunately, make for terribly compelling reading. Political intrigue, or even simply political musing, can of course be interesting enough in a work of science fiction, but fairly bland bureaucratic frittering is quite another thing. One can make getting a ship un-impounded only so interesting, it would seem.
What does happen in the first half of the book that is worth remaining engaged for, however, is the development of several of Dark Light's characters. Stone, one of the heathens and a character who becomes central to the novel's plot, is perhaps the most interesting among these. Biologically a man, Stone assumes the role of a "woman" in his society because of the lifestyle he has chosen to lead. This book does a number of interesting, refreshing and exciting things with gender, and at times reads like a work of ethnography, sociology, history and political philosophy all at once, like some sort of socialist anthropologist's Platonic dialogue.
Dark Light does eventually pick up pace (including political pace), and when it does, it can be a real page-turner. Yet even when it does, it's difficult to tell exactly when MacLeod is trying to be funny or satiric and when he's trying to convey this rich and complex universe he's created as being seriously plausible. (Caledonian wit's a tricky thing.) It's also difficult to tell exactly where the book's morality lies, but this is more of a good thing.
