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| Cover art by Mark Salwowski |
| THE SKY ROAD Ken MacLeod NY: TOR, October 1999 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-312-87335-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-312-87335-2 | 291pp. | HC | 24.95 | |
| Page 27: | "It was personal, it was a personal, a unique configuration of software agents that scanned the world and Myra's responses to the world, and built up from that interaction a shrewd assessment of her needs and interests. It looked out information for her..." |
| This may be a Britishism; but I'm thinking it S/B "looked up information". |
| Page 37: | "...and on to friends and workmates in drink-fuelled debates." |
| Spelling: S/B "drink-fueled". |
| Page 37: | "The Earth was filled with violence, and God sent an asteroid, Katy Boundary, to destroy it." |
| I guess it's just me, but this garbled mingling of science and religion rubs me the wrong way. |
| Page 61: | "I inherited the assets from my predecessors . . . and I never mentioned them because I thought you already knew,or you didn't and you needed to have deniability."
So it was true. The confirmation was less of a shock than Reid's original claim had been. It would take a while for the full enormity of it all to sink in. Myra nodded, her mouth full. Swallowed, with a shot of whisky. "The latter, actually, I didn't know. I thought they'd all been seized by the Yanks after the war." "Most of them were. There was one exception, though. A large portfolio of assets that made it through the crackdown, that the US/UN just couldn't get their hands on; one contract that was always renewed. Until the fall Revolution, of course. Then it . . . lapsed, and I was left holding the babies. They were sent back to us in a large consignment of large diplomatic bags, from various locations, all controlled by . . . " "You can tell me now, I take it?" Valentina looked around, and shrugged. "The original ministate, with the original mercenary defence force." Myra had to think for a moment before she realized just which state was meant. "Jesus wept!" |
| Such artful vagueness! I'll bet the bags were large. I won't say what these "assets" are, though it's not hard to figure out. I also have an idea what "the original ministate" is, but I may be wrong, and it's not very important. |
| Page 74: | "On the Saturday afternoon Merrial had guddled a trout from a dark, deep pool in the Alt na Chuirn glen...." |
| A Britishism, or portmanteau word? |
| Page 78: | "The train stopped for five minutes at Dunkeld. A small, old town of stone, still with its Christian cathedral." |
| The second sentence is not a sentence: S/B "???". |
| Page 87: | "That's all the files that mention Myra Godwin transferred, from the dark storage to the stane." |
| Spelling: S/B "stone". |
| Page 97: | "There it was, scribed on a hull panel from an old McDonnell Douglass SSTO heavy lifter." |
| Historical error: McDonnell-Douglas the company vanished long before this novel was written, the parts acquired by Boeing and others. Although it built the Delta Clipper and flew it up to a few thousand feet, it never came close to a true SSTO, more's the pity. A case could be made for alternate history, but that doesn't seem to fit with the author's intent. |
| Page 151: | "They would retain ultimate operational control — there was no way Suleimanyov could expect them to surrender that — but for all public and diplomatic and military purposes, they'd work together under one command." |
| Continuity error: S/B "there was no way Suleimanyov could have expected them to surrender that". Page 150 informs us that Suleimanyov was killed. Or did I miss something? |
| Page 220: | "Sauchiehall, Glasgow's main shopping street, had been depedestranised since she'd last been here and it thrummed with through traffic..." |
| Spelling: S/B "depedestrianised". |
| Page 257: | "The room's central chandelier, unlit at the moment, looked like a landing craft from an ancient and impressive alien civilization making its presence known." |
| Is this an homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind? ISTR the mother ship in that film being referred to as a "cosmic chandelier." |
| Page 259: | "What they want, presumably, is a passage across or to the north of Kazakhstan, as they make their way west to the Ukraine..." |
| Outmoded usage: S/B "Ukraine". |
| Page 263: | "They stalked and lurched about like Martian invaders; but the locals treated them with casual familiarity, like traffic or street-furniture. Perhaps, Myra thought wryly, it was the absence of searing heat-rays and writhing metal tentacles that did the trick." |
| More homage: This time to H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. |
| Page 267: | "Nok-Yung caught the allusion. 'It is not The Terminator. you know! Not — what was it in the films? — Skynet. It is not . . . inimical.' " |
| Yet more homage. |
| Page 267: | "More Luddism! The machines will form a benign human environment, a second nature, within which human nature can flourish, truly, for the first time." |
| Homage to Jack Williamson's The Humanoids? |
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