Gone is the smart political sensibilities and hyper-kinetics of his post-cyberpunk “Fall Revolution” series, or the vast, achingly distant noir universe of “Engines of Light”.

This is golden age science fiction – people in a spaceship, a new world, and a previously unsuspected alien race. Its a small book, with some good moments, but rather then the delicious disassociation that I associate with reading a Macleod novel, here he has worked hard to make the far future seem familiar and mundane.

Long the way you realize that Constantine is actually Heinlein’s Lazarus Long (spiritually if not literally), and then you really start to wonder what Ken is trying for.

The ending actually left me deeply disturbed, perhaps because I expect a Macleod book to have a progressive political vector, if a subterranean one, and yet this ended on a flatly apolitical and seemingly unconsidered note.