A Son of the Rock

Tor, 2008

Disclaimer: Gary Gibson is a (now detached? – he’s been in Taiwan for the past year) – member of the Glasgow SF writers’ circle and I have known him for quite some time.

Faster than light (transluminal) travel is kept under strict control by the Shoal, an aquatic alien race which restricts humanity to a relatively small volume of space accessed only by its coreships.
Dakota Merrick is a machine head. Her Ghost, a not quite AI implant, allows her to communicate almost telepathically with computers and especially with her space ship the Piri Reis. This ability led to her being part of a military expeditionary force whose command and control systems were subverted, culminating in a massacre. As a result her implants are now illegal. She is recruited by compatriots of the massacre victims to help resurrect and fly a derelict spaceship which apparently predates the Shoal but has a functioning transluminal drive of the type they use.
One of the Shoal is trying to prevent this development in order to avert a future war.
In the meantime, in the Magellanic Clouds, stars which ought to be stable are going nova.

The opportunities for conflict between characters here are many and varied and Gibson weaves all the strands together well, together with some flashback scenes illustrating the build up to, and commission of, the massacre. He does have a tendency to repeat the same noun very soon after a previous use, though sometimes within the same sentence. I find this distracting, but others may well have no problem with the practice.

There were faint echoes of Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels in Stealing Light but without quite the same quantity of visceral violence. This is partly due to the Space Operatic aspects of the setting and partly to the military/weapon wielding scenes.

Individual Shoal have ridiculous names, by the way. (Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals, anyone?) In the matter of names Iain M Banks has a lot to answer for.

The climax of Stealing Light involves a grand Science Fictional spectacle which I shan’t spoil here but about which I did have slight reservations concerning the timing of its events.

I can see where the book’s title comes from and what it is hinting at but for me it doesn’t really work. I suspect it may be more apposite to the sequence of books which Gibson’s blog implies Stealing Light starts off.

Of Gibson’s first three books this is by far the best. I look forward to the sequel – whose title seems to give the game away somewhat.