Newton's Wake
Newton's Wake: A Space Opera.
British Science Fiction Award nominee 2004, John W. Campbell Award nominee 2005, Prometheus Award nominee 2005.
The Hard Rapture took Earth's best minds away. Now the rest are about to find out where they went...
Centuries ago, space settlers and soldiers fled to the stars from the sentient AI war machines that engulfed Earth. They colonised Eurydice, a planet whose rocks contain traces of its own war machines - some of which still guard a vast, enigmatic artifact on a remote tundra.
When an expedition raids this strange artifact, the Eurydiceans discover that they weren't the last survivors of humanity after all. Their leisured lifestyle is about to be disrupted by new arrivals for whom Eurydice is a prize worth fighting over.
And the long-dormant war machines are awakening...
Newton's Wake is a stunning stand-alone space opera, charting the struggle for human survival in a universe dominated by post-human intelligence.
Ken MacLeod
Ken MacLeod (born 1954), an award-winning Scottish science fiction writer, lives in South Queensferry near Edinburgh. He graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics.
MacLeod's novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism. Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection. MacLeod's general outlook can be best described as techno-utopian socialist.
He is part of a new generation of British science fiction writers, who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross and Liz Williams.