Synopses & Reviews
Matt Cairns is a 21st-century outlaw Programmer who takes on the shady jobs no one else will touch. Against his better judgment, he accepts an assignment to crack the Marshall Titov, a top-secret orbital station operated by the European Space Agency. But what Matt will discover there will propel him on an extraordinary and quite unexpected journey.
Gregor Cairns is an exobiology student and descendant of one of Terra Nova's first families. Hopelessly infatuated with a lovely young trader's daughter, he is unaware that his research partner, Elizabeth, has fallen in love with him. Together, Gregor and Elizabeth confront the great work his family began three centuries earlier-to rediscover the secret of interstellar travel.
Ranging from a gritty near-future Earth to a distant alien world, Cosmonaut Keep is contemporary science fiction at its highest level, a visionary epic filled with daring individuals seeking a place for themselves in a vast, complex, and enigmatic universe. Cosmonaut Keep is a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel.
Review
"Science fiction's freshest new writer" --Salon
"Plenty of eye-kicks and some wonderful set pieces, from the arrival of a gigantic starship to the herding of dinosaurs by flying saucers . . . . Cosmonaut Keep is a portal to a deeply imagined future history that parlays X-Files paranoia about Area 51 and alien Greys into a vast interstellar community watched over by microcosmic gods." -Paul McAuley, Interzone
Synopsis
This opening novel of a "new future history" features two tales of mankind's first encounters with a mysterious alien civilization. Matt Cairns, a 21st century outlaw computer programmer, struggles to survive a politically turbulent near-future Europe. Three hundred years later, Matt's descendant, Gregor Cairns, makes a home for himself on a distant and exotic alien world.
About the Author
Ken MacLeod holds a degree in zoology and has worked in the fields of biomechanics and computer programming. His first two novels,
The Star Fraction and
The Stone Canal, each won the Prometheus Award;
The Cassini Division was a finalist for the Nebula Award; and
The Sky Road won the British Science Fiction Association Award and is a finalist for the Hugo Award.
Dark Light continues the world of his fifth novel,
Cosmonaut Keep. Ken MacLeod lives near Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife and children.