482 ( )

Ancestral Machines is a stand alone book that fits into the Humanity's Fire universe and has some of the elaborate background from that series. Even so, it can be read by itself.

It's a space opera on the gigantic scale. Millions of years ago, in the Greater Shining Galaxy, a number of worlds got together to hook planets together in a geometrical shape with a sun at the centre to form a kind of spaceship that could wander about. Over time, it turned into a permanent war zone and eventually a ruling elite dedicated to non-stop combat took over. Now it has arrived in the Milky Way and a number of disparate groups go to investigate, including Captain Brandon Pike, a free trader, and his ragtag crew of misfits.

The story rolls along nicely and there is plenty of invention for SF fans to wallow in. The characters are pretty standard types and it's a rollicking adventure yarn. Don't look for any depth but go along for the ride and you'll enjoy it. ( )

Mike is a friend of many years – I believe we first met at the first convention I ever attended, Mexicon 3 in Nottingham in 1989. So, on the one hand, that’s a long enough friendship to survive a negative review; but on the other, it feels somewhat off to tell a mate he’s written a bad book. In fact, most people I know won’t review books by friends – but, seriously, your friendship must be pretty fragile if it can’t survive someone’s opinion over a piece of fiction, FFS. Which is by no means a cunning lead-in to saying that Ancestral Machines is a bad book. Mike can write – he’s especially good at writing descriptive prose, which is unusual in genre writers – but Ancestral Machines definitely suffers from too much Banks and not enough Cobley. I mean, it was obvious from the first book of the Humanity’s Fire trilogy, Seeds of Earth, that Mike was ploughing a Banks furrow, but he made it enough of his own it didn’t matter. Unfortunately, Ancestral Machines reads like he tried a bit too hard. The book opens with two AIs, very much like Minds, discussing what will become the plot. Then you have the crew of a tramp spaceship, who are either the most inept or the unluckiest ever, because everything they do fails. They get dragged into the story when their ship is stolen. There’s a BDO in the form of an artificial planetary system of two hundred worlds, which can travel between galaxies and whose inhabitants are in thrall to a handful of evil alien overlords called Gun-Lords, who are actually sentient alien weapons who have taken over host bodies. The whole BDO is set up as the arena for brutal wargames, often with death tolls in the millions, and a league table of the victors. The AIs and the freighter crew end up involved with an attempted rebellion against the Gun-Lords, who are set to steal lots of worlds to put in their BDO. It’s all a bit of madcap dash from one set-piece to the next, and the plot seems to teeter on the edge of falling over for much of the book’s length. The banter didn’t always work for me, and the characters seemed a tad generic, but there’s some good space opera invention, and if the ending is a bit pat, it’s not an easy one. I’d sooner space operas didn’t feel the need for mega-bodycounts, but at least in Ancestral Machines the evil bastards get their just desserts. ( )

Adequate, decent ideas, pop feel, weak execution. ( )

Ersatz Banksian "Culture" sans humour and wild imagination. I didn't finish. ( )