Centuries after its catastrophic Deliverance, humanity is again reaching into space. And one young scholar working in the space-ship yard, Clovis colha Gree, could make the difference between success and failure.In the sequence that started with The Star Fraction, MacLeod has created a future where the crucial historical event is left-wing students arguing about anarchism in the 70s. On this turns the destruction and renaissance of civilisation, here and elsewhere in the human galaxy. In his fourth book The Sky Road he productively fills in some of the gaps. This is the story of Myra, Trot turned entrepreneur, whose nuclear deterrence-for-hire is so crucial to the event known by some as the Fall and others as the Deliverance. It is also the story of young Clovis, part-time worker in the yard building the first spaceship for centuries, part-time scholar trying to find out what Myra the Deliverer was really like. MacLeod's quirky and intelligent take on the world of power politics--the paradoxes that arise when ideology is made praxis--and his charmingly cynical gift for engaging and engaged protagonists, are something to which the SF audience has become used. What this book also has is a profound sense of the beauty of a simpler and stiller world; MacLeod's real gift is his capacity to see all sides of a question, even when he is sure of the answer. --Roz Kaveney