This one ticks a lot of steampunk/dieselpunk boxes – Zeppelins, an alternate history with political union with France that somehow keeps Britain as Top Nation, a conspiracy involving the Royal family, ocean liners and electric Citroens. Except that in chapter 1, an electric Citroen had a clutch and gearbox. And there was a severe slip in the dialogue where one character probes a detective’s conversation about a murder suspect and questions why the suspect has been referred to as “him” – except they haven’t been. I thought this boded ill, but once we were introduced to the eponymous Ack-Ack Macaque, things improved (possibly because he spoke to me in the voice of Ron Perelman in Hellboy).
Ack-Ack Macaque is a gun-toting, Spitfire-flying pilot in a video game. He has an eyepatch and a permanent cigar. He is quickly revealed to be an avatar of an actual monkey, given brain augments to try to find a cheaper route to AI. Once liberated from the video game, he becomes the counter-conspiracy’s secret weapon.
The story moves fairly fast (assisted by quite short chapters) and the level of invention doesn’t really flag. Yet for all that the story was supposed to be set in 2059, I kept feeling as though I was in another bit of fantastic film – Goddard’s Alphaville, where the dialogue is all about spaceships, computers and interplanetary politics, but the visuals are 1966 Paris in luminous monochrome. Little of the description in this novel suggested we were in the future, just a present day with some different, albeit cool, gadgets.
And then in chapter 18, we are shown the effects of global warming in the form of flooded coastal areas. How come no-one mentioned that before?
There are plots to create a zombie android army; and another plot to seize power by subverting the personality of the Prince of Wales. Why do so many people think that controlling the British monarchy would result in a transfer or seizure of political power? Mr. Powell should go and look up “constitutional monarchy” and see how long we’ve had one of those – a lot longer ago than 1959, when this world’s history diverges from ours.
It kept me entertained for a few evenings, and Monsieur Macaque himself was a pleasant surprise. And yet: this won the British Science Fiction Association’s Award for best novel in 2013, jointly with Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. The Leckie is a tour de force of mind-stretching ideas; her Ancillary series of books were the first in years to actually engage what old-time fans called “a sense of wonder”, for me at least. But a considerable number of people thought that this book was the best thing to appear in the UK that year; to which I say “Is that seriously the best we can do?”
Deep Waters Reading 