The Concluding Volume of the Engines of Light With Cosmonaut Keep and Dark Light , both finalists for science fiction’s Hugo Award, Ken MacLeod launched a new interstellar epic with all the engaging characters and ingenious SF inventiveness of his earlier Fall Revolution novels. Now MacLeod delivers the culmination of his epic of a human future crammed with innumerable varieties of intelligent alien life, and in which humans find themselves involved in the politics of aliens as powerful and inscrutable as gods...and entangled in their wars. For ten thousand years, Nova Babylonia has been the greatest city of the Second Sphere, an interstellar civilization of human and other beings who have been secretly removed, throughout history, from Earth. Now humans from the far reaches of the Sphere have come to offer immortality—and to urge them to build defenses against the alien invasion they know is coming. As humans and aliens compete and conspire, the wheels of history will lathe all the players into shapes new and surprising. The alien invasion will reach New Babylon at last—led by the most alien figure of all. One of the most unorthodox contemporary sf writers here concludes something quite orthodox--a trilogy. What's more, The Engines of Light is a trilogy about human evolution, a theme that was well-worn in sf when MacLeod's parents were in diapers. But not to despair, readers who love MacLeod the quirkster. Mingulay, a planet in the center of the now-menaced Second Sphere, may be 10,000 years from MacLeod's home in Scotland, but his edgy satire of what human folly gets people and civilizations into remains as sharp as ever. His alien invaders seem neither particularly alien nor even odd, compared to some human cultures in the Sphere and even on Mingulay, and even gross political issues manage to get drawn into the human debate over whether to accept the gift of immortality and what the motives of those offering it might be. Perhaps this book will be only marginally accessible to those who didn't start reading the trilogy with Cosmonaut Keep (2001), so have that and Dark Light (2002) handy. Roland Green Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Ken MacLeod's novels are fast, funny, and sophisticated. There can never be enough books like these.”—Kim Stanley Robinson “One of SF’s hottest new authors.”—Locus Engine City The Concluding Volume of the Engines of Light “Science fiction’s freshest new writer.” --Salon “Ken MacLeod's novels are fast, funny, and sophisticated. There can never be enough books like these.”—Kim Stanley Robinson “One of SF’s hottest new authors.”— Locus Praise for The Engines of Light “Ken MacLeod doesn’t just create believable futures—he breaks them down to explain what makes them tick.” - Wired on Cosmonaut Keep “A portal to a deeply imagined future history that parlays X-Files paranoia about Area 51 and alien Greys into a vast interstellar community watched over by microcosmic gods.” --Paul McAuley on Cosmonaut Keep “Marvelously inventive.”-- San Diego Union-Tribune on Dark Light “MacLeod at his strongest: clever, passionate, and committed.” — SFX on Dark Light Ken MacLeod holds a degree in zoology and has worked in the fields of biomechanics and computer programming. His first two novels, The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal , each won the Prometheus Award; The Cassini Division was a finalist for the Nebula Award; and The Sky Road won the British Science Fiction Association Award and was a finalist for the Hugo Award, as were his next two novels, Cosmonaut Keep and Dark Light . Ken MacLeod lives near Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife and children. 1 The Advancement of Learning The jump is instantaneous. To a photon, the whole history of the universe may be like this: over in a flash, before it's had time to blink. To a human, it's disorienting. One moment, you're an hour out from the last planet you visited--then, without transition, you're an hour away from the next. Volkov spent the first of these hours preparing for his arrival, conscious that he would have no time to do so in the second. * * * My name is Grigory Andreievich Volkov. I am two hundred and forty years old, I was born about a hundred thousand years ago, and as many light-years away: Kharkov, Russian Federation, Earth, in the year 2018. As a young conscript, I fought in the Ural Caspian Oil War. I was with the first troops to enter Marseilles and to bathe their sore feet in the waters of the Mediterranean. In 2040,1 became a cosmonaut of the European Union, and three years later made the first human landing on the surface of Venus. In 2046 I volunteered for work on the space station Marshal Titov , which in 2049 was renamed the Bright Star . It became the first human-controlled starship. In it I traveled to the Second Sphere. For the past two centuries I have lived on Mingulay and Croatan. This is my first visit to Nova Terra. I hop