(Another from the files of old book reviews I uncovered while shifting web spaces. This was first posted back in mid-to-late 2000.)

I've been holding off on reading Ken MacLeod's books despite the huge volume of praise they've received because the type of praise and the people delivering it suggested to me that they wouldn't really be my thing. The books are celebrated enough that I had to take at least a look, so when I saw The Cassini Division in mass-market pb, I picked it up to read on the plane to and from France last week (I realize this is not supposed to be a good place to start, but it's the only one in mmpb in the States, and I'm not paid well enough to buy books I don't expect to like in hardcover).

I wound up spending most of the flight watching British Airways's nifty personal video screens (reviews: Frequency: not bad at all. Gone in 60 Seconds: very bad indeed on a screen the size of a paperback. The first 20 minutes of Chicken Run: still a hoot.), but I did get a start on the book, which I finished last night.

All in all, my reaction comes as no real surprise (possibly a self-fulfilling prophecy, but who knows). I didn't exactly bounce off it, but it's just not my thing. The gadgets and settings were cool enough (though with the exception of the "babbages," they weren't really anything that hasn't been seen elsewhere), and I probably would've been happy with them had they been employed in the service of a different plot.

Such as the plot was, anyway. It was very much in the meandering Heinleinian mode of using a contrived series of future-historical events as an excuse to pause frequently and lecture about political philosophy. This is where it just isn't my thing- I'm a fairly apolitical guy, all in all, and I'm just not excited by the theory of political systems (and theory it was, for the most part, since both the Solar Union and New Mars appear to be populated with the spherical, frictionless humans beloved of theorists...). The book was further undermined by the tendency to deliver the political information in infodumps from the same genus as the dread "As you know, Bob...," constructed from Straczynski-class Tin Ear Dialogue (though, to be fair, I really like the phrase "The Rapture for Nerds"). The moral questions which are supposed to be raised by the main character's actions never really gelled for me (probably because the internal narration is so slanted), and the way things fall out at the end felt cheap (this is deliberately vague to avoid spoilers- more detail will be provided on request).