Thursday, August 20, 1998
Title: The Cassini Division
Author: Ken MacLeod
Publisher: Orbit
The Cassini Division is the third instalment in MacLeod's loosely related serial. Starting his career with The Star Fraction, he offered a very enjoyable and re-readable piece of work. Set in the near future, The Star Fraction had that joy of believable extrapolation. In a post-post...revolution-splintered UK, we are set up for the next revolution, the next wave of change with the imminent birth of an AI-generated master plan and the threat that the US/UN star wars system will wipe out any country where an AI is detected.
Some years after the events of The Star Fraction, comes The Stone Canal set on the newly colonised New Mars. Here we had a more alien territory, yet MacLeod flashes from the AI-enabled New Mars to memories and rivalries of Glasgow in the 1970s. Plausible SF factors once again tied to recognisable elements that hook us in.
With a couple of characters from The Stone Canal returning through the wormhole to Jupiter they encounter The Cassini Division. Which brings us to here, starting 5 years after those events and focusing on the members of this system defence force who encountered the returnees. Here MacLeod takes us back to the futures of drastic political, social, and technological change. Having gained the technology, a splinter of the human race has given itself up to machine technology. Accelerating through AI, these people become the fast folk; rapid thinking living generations, they devour Jupiter's moon and create the wormhole. While The Stone Canal dealt with the people that got carried along on this journey, The Cassini Division shows what happened to the worlds left behind. The fast folk who remained turned in on themselves becoming demented, a side-effect of which was the transmission of deadly viral broadcasts. Broadcasts which wiped out all of our technology resulting in great difficulties. Rebuilding ourselves we put the Cassini Division in place to watch Jupiter - the wormhole and fast folk.
With the return of humans from New Mars and the subsequent rebirth of the fast folk, something must be done to ensure that the AI on either side of the wormhole are not a threat to what has been rebuilt.
While The Cassini Division does have the flashing back to a past, it is still a future to us. As such it does not trigger the same responses as the easy extendibility of The Star Fraction or regression of The Stone Canal. Which means that it loses an element of that accessibility. Having said that, I have no doubt that The Cassini Division is as well written and as enjoyable as his previous books. The familiar themes remain and move on, making this a fitting extension of his work. Full of communistic anarchies and capitalistic anarchies, MacLeod presents his interpretations on these doctrines, while the tech aspect is important and impressive though integrated enough that it is fully a part of the story and totally unobtrusive.
After a long wait for this in paperback, I can recommend anyone unfamiliar with MacLeod's novels picks up The Star Fraction and works their way to here. My only complaint is the length of time it took to make this available at an affordable price and they cancelled the joy of that out by releasing the next volume The Sky Road in hardback at the same time.
RVWR: PTR
August 1998
