Window on high-tech, Sky-fi future

The Sky Road Ken Macleod (Orbit, #16.99) Reviewed by Ziauddin Sardar Imagine, 50 years from now, you switch on your old, rotting Pentium PC. The device swings into action and Windows 98 boots up. A tall order? A miracle I would say, given the fact that Windows is about the most unstable operating system on the planet. But this unlikely scenario is at the heart of The Sky Road, the fourth novel by West Lothian author Ken Macleod.

It is a cerebral yarn that takes the technology of the familiar present and projects it into a not-too-distant future. Computer viruses have become a bit more sophisticated, expert systems have acquired a life of their own and nuclear weapons have moved out into earth's orbit.

The trick of Macleod's fiction is to entice the reader with prevailing and well-known technology and then to reveal it in a totally unexpected garb. The future is presented not as an unknown territory but as a product of our current behaviour. Two narratives run in parallel. The first is set in a future Scotland that has re-industrialised after a nuclear holocaust. It is a gentle, ecologically sound society where the old myths of religion and nationalism have been replaced by more recent parables of fall and deliverance. The narrator, Clovis colha Gree, is a history student writing a thesis on Myra Godwin-Davidova, who was responsible for the nuclear "Deliverance" and has come to be known as "the Deliverer". To pay for his studies, Colvis works part-time as a welder on a spaceship that will be the first to be launched in generations. He meets and falls in love with Merrial. She is the future equivalent of our computer nerds, who are now socially ostracised and known as "tinkers". Together they steal the computer files of Myra in an attempt to discover the motives of the Deliverer. The second narrative focuses on Myra. A Trotskyite and active member of the Fourth International, Myra studied at the University of Glasgow in the 1970s. She marries a Kazakh and ends up as the Prime Minister of the International Scientific and Technical Workers Republic, a city-state on the borders of Kazakhstan. Even though she smokes and drinks too much, Myra becomes a sexually hyperactive centurion thanks to a host of anti-ageing technologies. She lives through the third world war which transforms the geopolitics. The separate narratives inevitably intertwine to produce a whole range of technological scenarios. Macloed mines the data rich past - or our present - to explore a possible, wholly creditable future. Parts of Myra's story read like Frederick Forsyth on a bad day, complete with CIA agents, coups in far away countries and all the necessary revolutionary upheaval. But once you get into the novel, it holds your attention until the denouement. Macleod is strong as a political thinker, examining contradictions in everything from utopian socialism to free-market libertarianism. Initially, The Sky Road projects technology as a double-edged sword: it is a vital ingredient for progress but it also has an unhealthy side. Macleod poses the question: at what stage does technological progress dissolves into the law of diminishing returns? It's one of Macleod's strengths that he's not afraid to ask big questions. So is he content to fall back on stereotypes? The non-Western characters seem to have been acquired as a job lot from a cheap American thriller. The Korean and Japanese are happy working as robots in slave-like conditions. Muslims are fanatics who worship Khomeni. The Kozakhs value honour more than their lives. Indeed, Macleod seems to be saying they can believe the fantasy of a classless society because they have already sold their souls to the machine. Such banal orientalising mars an otherwise idea-laden story. There is much to argue with in The Sky Road. But that does not effect its considerable power and literary merit. Macleod puts plausible science back into science fiction and, in the process, raises the genre high above the humdrum.

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