When Alexander Cairns made his fortune, he did some gambling - financing interstallar probes to look for other life forms. Now his son has discovered that one of them has sent back evidence of alien intelligence, and a space ark financed by a rival family is obliviously approaching the area. Like a British--specifically, Scots--counterpart of Bruce Sterling, Ken MacLeod is an SF author who has thought hard about politics and delights in making unlikely alternatives plausible, grippingly readable and often downright funny.

Cosmonaut Keep swaps between two timelines whose characters share the ultimate goal of interstellar travel. In an uncertain future on the far world of Mingulay, human colonists live in the title's ancient, alien-built Keep--coexisting with reptilian "saurs", trading with visiting ships piloted by krakens, and hiding their laborious "Great Work" of developing human-guided navigation between the stars.

Meanwhile alternate chapters present a mid-21st century Earth whose EU is (to America's horror) Russian-dominated with a big red star in the middle of its flag, rumours of alien contact aboun, and computer whizzkid Matt Cairns finds himself carrying a datadisk of unknown origin that offers antigravity and a space drive.

Clearly the later storyline's Gregor Cairns is Matt's descendant. There are ingenious connections and surprises, with witty resonances between their wild careers, their travels and their bumpy love-lives. The foreground action-adventure points to a bigger picture and a master plan known only to the godlike hive-minds who built the "Second Sphere" of interstellar culture and who regard traditional SF dreams of unlimited human expansion through space as precisely equivalent to floods of e-mail spam polluting the tranquil galactic net.

Cosmonaut Keep opens MacLeod's new SF sequence Engines of Light. It is highly entertaining and intelligent, promising more good things to come. --David Langford

Genre: Science Fiction