Fiction Reviews
Beyond the Reach of Earth
(2023) Ken MacLeod, Orbit, £9.99, pbk, 339pp, ISBN 978-0-356-51480-2
This is the second book in Ken Macleod’s 'Lightspeed' trilogy, following immediately on from the last book, 2021’s Beyond the Hallowed Sky, both set in 2070 where three global power blocs are putting tentative feelers out into the galaxy with their new faster than light (FTL) drives. Last time around the Union (basically an expanded EU, including Scotland) finally catches up with the Alliance (mainly America and the anglophone countries, including England) and the Co-ordinated States (Co-Ord - mainly China and Russia) by getting its own FTL drive, from a design sent back in time by the designer (Laksmi Nayak) to herself. Submarines become spaceships, and there’s a colony on a world called Apis where there seem to be mysterious resident aliens lurking in the rocks. Oh and there’s a humanoid AI (Marcus Owen) charming and flattering and then ultimately betraying the people who begin to think of him as their friend, casually destroying a cloud habitat on Venus and not caring whether its inhabitants live or die.
And politics. The Union spaceship/submarine, the Fighting Chance, captained by the submarine-maker and story hero John Grant, plays an important role in rescuing many of the survivors from Cloud City, but the Co-Ord’s not happy and tries to blow it out of the (Venusian) sky (well, Venusian orbit). So the Fighting Chance extends its FTL drive around the space station holding the survivors and jumps away, with a whole galaxy to explore…
Book 2 (Beyond…) acts with considerable restraint in not spreading itself across the whole galaxy, but it does expand the series’ scope to another new world, a moon around a planet in the E-Prime system they call the Mushroom Moon because all its indigenous life is fungus based, and its spores haves hallucinogenic qualities. There’s a colony there too, somewhat altered by all those magic mushrooms. Oh and the aliens are there too.
We still spend some time on Apis, though, trying to make sense of the mysterious alien rocks and watching out for the intriguing android, Marcus Owen, and his next betrayal. Owen has orders from the Alliance to sabotage the Union’s attempts to catch up in the space race, and to find out what the aliens are up to before anyone else can. We get some answers here, but not enough to suggest we’re not going to need another instalment!
So plenty going on. There are hints at time travel and dimension hopping, too, though these aren’t fully explored. Thew worldbuilding hints at a very broad canvas and some big themes but infuriatingly largely leaves them as hints and suppositions - aside from the obvious dramatic potential of multiverse-hopping, I wish Macleod had done more with the idea of England and Scotland being in different global power blocs, for instance. Still, there’s a third novel in the series yet to be published so I’m hoping we’ll leap in to all the great possibilities developed in this book and its predecessor.
This is good old fashioned hard-ish space opera in the grand old Scottish tradition. Entertaining.
Mark Bilsborough
You can see Jonathan's take on Beyond the Reach of Earth here.
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