by Ken MacLeod
271pp, Orbit, £16.99
"The god who later became known as the asteroid 10049 Lora, and shortly afterwards as the ESA mining station Marshal Titov, was not unusual of its kind." The first sentence of "States of Mind", the prologue to book three of Ken MacLeod's Engines of Light, sends a clear signal to anyone inclined to climb aboard. It will be a hectic ride, through slaloms of audacious complexity, irreverent ingenuity and paradox as purposeful as it is playful. Those who have read books one and two, Cosmonaut Keep and Dark Light, may wish they had had this prologue to help them when they started, not to mention the potted biography of Grigory Andreievich Volkov in chapter one and the handy interplanetary "orientation leaflet for newbie passengers" quoted in full in chapter 3 (brazenly entitled "RTFM").
For newbies and others, here is book three. A hundred thousand years from now, in the "Second Sphere", a solar system 100,000 light years away, a group comprising a Scottish anarchist computer programmer transplanted from the year 2049, the subverted heiress of an interplanetary mercantile dynasty, a melancholy alien Grey, and self-replicating octopods with two mouths and fibre-optic hair, must attempt to thwart the misguided efforts of an unreconstructed 240-year-old communist to arm a placid utopia of stellar transplantees against the rest of the octopod race, who come bringing nothing but enthusiasm, omnipotence and immortality.
Since Star Trek and Star Wars, and science fiction's subsequent refurbishment as a design option for pop videos and role-playing games, it's hard sometimes to remember that the genre used to be a critical discourse: a way of contemplating the unprecedented. Early futurists such as Edward Bellamy and HG Wells intended to demonstrate, rhetorically, how things might be, in best- or worst-case scenarios or from a viewpoint not yet accessible. They meant to make us think. Perhaps when the literature shrinks back, as it must, to a minority taste, it will do the same again. If so, MacLeod has positioned himself well for posterity.
In 1998, in an essay called "Science Fiction After the Future Went Away", MacLeod suggested that the principal topic for SF today is the spectre of the post-human, expressing "a continued confidence in technological and scientific progress combined with a scepticism about the capacity of humanity to power it". Engines of Light narrates the difficult promotion of Homo sapiens up the great chain of being, from terrestrial to interstellar status.
Cosmonaut Keep and Dark Light identified six other intelligent species. "Pithkies" and "gigants", the little and giant people of folktale and legend, proved to have been evacuated to the Second Sphere long ago by the "saurs", stoical, long-lived bipeds descended from dinosaurs, working in consort with the "kraken", enigmatic space-faring super-squid. Responsible for the prehistoric elevation of saurs and kraken are the octopods, missionary intruders from another star. Engine City adds a further intelligent species, intriguing if entirely superfluous to the plot: "selkies", sea-dwelling hominids.
Above and beyond everything wheel the "gods", hyper-intelligent collectives of extremophile nanobacteria living inside asteroids and cometary nuclei. Their power, executed by meteor, is enormous. Their first and last commandment is "KEEP THE NOISE DOWN".
Inclusivity is MacLeod's great principle. Few writers acknowledge, implicitly or explicitly, so many influences: not only old masters like Wells and Olaf Stapledon, Arthur C Clarke and Poul Anderson, but also radical contemporaries like Gwyneth Jones and Bruce Sterling.
Engine City echoes the brassy raids on infinitude of Greg Bear, Dan Simmons and David Brin; matches the punctilious utopian and dystopian projections of Brian Aldiss and Kim Stanley Robinson; co-opts Harry Harrison's machinating saurians and the multiplanetary vistas of Peter Hamilton, not to mention the imaginative energy of MacLeod's close friend and mentor Iain M Banks.
Scientifically, MacLeod stretches wide enough to accommodate both James Lovelock's Gaia and Richard Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker. From folklore and pseudoscience he not only borrows leprechauns and yeti, sea monsters, alien abductors in flying saucers, crop circles and men in black, but does so in a way that suggests how they got there in the first place.
He quotes casually from John Donne and the Rolling Stones, and sends us to the dictionary for words like artel, latifundia and camarilla. He splinters the white light of socialism into a spectrum of so many variants, it's hard to tell which of them count as perversions. Perhaps they all do.
· Colin Greenland's new novel, Finding Helen, is published next March.