BOOKS
BEYOND THE HALLOWED SKY
Note to self
★★★★★
► RELEASED OUT NOW!
368 pages
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Paperback/ebook/audiobook
► Author Ken MacLeod
► Publisher Orbit
Is it an adequate description to call Ken MacLeod a science fiction writer? Sure, Beyond The Hallowed Sky has been trailed as the first volume in “a new space opera trilogy” and he’s not averse (to quote Margaret Atwood’s rather sniffy assessment of SF) to “rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space”. Yet the description seems inadequate.
Which isn’t to say he’s anything as straightforward as a slipstream novelist. Rather, MacLeod’s fiction, as it has developed over recent years, has become distinctive enough to be almost worthy of its own genre, which we might call mordant, technologically-enhanced magical realism firmly rooted in Scotland. Even when his fiction doesn’t specifically feature a dreich day in Gourock, it’s there in spirit.
Logically, it follows that MacLeod’s fiction should be downbeat. But it never is, because MacLeod is so adept at serving up dry jokes that cut through the drizzle. This new trilogy, for example, offers a vision of mankind in the wake of the discovery of faster-than-light (FTL) travel. Great, we can go to the stars. Except that travelling in this way imbues people with a kind of awful sense of existential dread. Off you go exploring then, but don’t be thinking it’ll all be fun and games. If the SF community needs a universal things-thatdads-say figurehead, MacLeod is the man for the job.