“The Corporation Wars Trilogy”, by Ken MacLeod

 

896 pages, Orbit, ISBN-13: 978-0316489249

I had never heard of Ken MacLeod when, utilizing some of the credit I have accrued at 2^nd & Charles, I picked up his The Corporation Wars Trilogy, presented here in an omnibus edition – which is probably a good thing for, reading his bio, I would have seen very little that would have enticed me: he was a Trotskyist activist in the 1970s and early 1980s whose mature work explores socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, especially Trotskyism, extreme economic libertarianism, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection…none of which floats my boat. But it turns out that The Corporation Wars is damn good hard science fiction that, as far as I can tell, pushes none of these ideas in obvious fashion.

The Corporation Wars occurs many years after the Last War on Earth in which robots are sent to another star to terraform a planet for human colonists to eventually enjoy – only to become self-aware. The corporations in charge of this development combat these rogue robots – or “freebots” as they term themselves – with computer downloaded personalities of fighters long dead, only to have the factions they once fought for long ago reignite old rivalries and battles. So there are many moving parts as corporations and factions and freebots and humans and so on fight and unite and perish and reboot, all against an interstellar backdrop in which ultimate “victory” is maddeningly elusive, even as it is difficult to quantify.

In Dissidence MacLeod delves into the psyches of Artificial Intelligence, Simulacrums (or not), humans (kinda), robots (both self-aware and no), hardware (of various types) and the space opera motif in general. You have to pay attention to the many characters and their particular form and function as it can get confusing; furthermore, a couple of times one character or another “gets it” but I had to reread it to “get it” myself – in short, this is not dumb Sci-Fi but deep, existential stuff in which Deep Thoughts are spoken and High Concepts are aired. Oh, and don’t fret the ending; its part one of a trilogy and is simply paving the way for the next books. So far MacLeod has come up with a smart and engaging premise and set an interesting cast to work exploring it.

With Insurgence we pick up right where we left off in Dissidence in which rival corporations are still trying to claim habitable territory for humanity, the robot uprising and Rax infiltration have complicated matters and the motives of Earth’s ultimate authority, the Direction, are cloudy, at best. There are plots within plots within plots here, delicate layers of organizational, personal and ideological motives, directed and constrained by the limits of resources, legal freedom and, above all, physics. I suspect that even as we think we figure out what’s going on there are hidden hands at work somewhere; much of what’s already happened might, actually, have been planned or at least foreseen. But by whom? And for what ultimate purpose?

Emergence, the final book, ties everything up in a satisfying, if rather too neat, ending. The battles between humans and robots and the Direction and the Axle and the Rax continue, but they are really not the point, for MacLeod has written a philosophical deep-dive into the nature of consciousness and reality, utilizing a dark wit. The theories delved into defy easy categorization, suffice to say that the themes are not flippantly introduced and then rapidly discarded; they are, rather, integral to the plot and their logical implications are typically followed-through to the end. If hard Sci-Fi and how a philosophical bar debate could trigger a gamified interplanetary war, The Corporation Wars these are the books for you.