Review:
The Sky Road, by Ken MacLeod
| Series: |
Fall Revolution #4 |
| Publisher: |
Tor |
| Copyright: |
1999 |
| Printing: |
August 2001 |
| ISBN: |
0-8125-7759-0 |
| Format: |
Mass market |
| Pages: |
406 |
The Sky Road is the fourth book in the Fall Revolution series, but
it represents an alternate future that diverges after (or during?) the
events of
The Sky Fraction. You probably
want to read that book first, but I'm not sure reading
The Stone Canal or
The Cassini Division adds anything to
this book other than frustration. Much more on that in a moment.
Clovis colha Gree is a aspiring doctoral student in history with a summer
job as a welder. He works on the platform for the project, which the
reader either slowly discovers from the book or quickly discovers from the
cover is a rocket to get to orbit. As the story opens, he meets (or, as he
describes it) is targeted by a woman named Merrial, a tinker who works on
the guidance system. The early chapters provide only a few hints about
Clovis's world: a statue of the Deliverer on a horse that forms the
backdrop of their meeting, the casual carrying of weapons, hints that
tinkers are socially unacceptable, and some division between the white
logic and the black logic in programming.
Also, because this is a Ken MacLeod novel, everyone is obsessed with
smoking and tobacco the way that the protagonists of erotica are obsessed
with sex.
Clovis's story is one thread of this novel. The other, told in the
alternating chapters, is the story of Myra Godwin-Davidova, chair of the
governing Council of People's Commissars of the International Scientific
and Technical Workers' Republic, a micronation embedded in post-Soviet
Kazakhstan. Series readers will remember Myra's former lover, David Reid,
as the villain of
The Stone Canal and the head of the corporation
Mutual Protection, which is using slave labor (sort of) to support a
resurgent space movement and its attempt to take control of a balkanized
Earth. The ISTWR is in decline and a minor power by all standards except
one: They still have nuclear weapons.
So, first, we need to talk about the series divergence.
I know from reading about this book on-line that
The Sky Road is an
alternate future that does not follow the events of
The Stone Canal
and
The Cassini Division. I do not know this from the text of the
book, which is completely silent about even being part of a series.
More annoyingly, while the divergence in the Earth's future compared to
The Cassini Division is obvious, I don't know what the
Jonbar
hinge is. Everything I can find on-line about this book is maddeningly
coy. Wikipedia claims the divergence happens at the end of
The Sky
Fraction. Other reviews and the Wikipedia talk page claim it happens in
the middle of
The Stone Canal. I do have a guess, but it's an
unsatisfying one and I'm not sure how to test its correctness. I suppose I
shouldn't care and instead take each of the books on their own terms, but
this is the type of thing that my brain obsesses over, and I find it
intensely irritating that MacLeod didn't explain it in the books
themselves. It's the sort of authorial trick that makes me feel dumb, and
books that gratuitously make me feel dumb are less enjoyable to read.
The second annoyance I have with this book is also only partly its fault.
This series, and this book in particular, is frequently mentioned as good
political science fiction that explores different ways of structuring
human society. This was true of some of the earlier books in a
surprisingly superficial way. Here, I would call it hogwash.
This book, or at least the Myra portion of it, is full of people doing
politics in a tactical sense, but like the previous books of this series,
that politics is mostly embedded in personal grudges and prior romantic
relationships. Everyone involved is essentially an authoritarian whose
ability to act as they wish is only contested by other authoritarians and
is largely unconstrained by such things as persuasion, discussions,
elections, or even theory. Myra and most of the people she meets are
profoundly cynical and almost contemptuous of any true discussion of
political systems. This is the trappings and mechanisms of politics
without the intellectual debate or attempt at consensus, turning it into a
zero-sum game won by whoever can threaten the others more effectively.
Given the glowing reviews I've seen in relatively political SF circles,
presumably I am missing something that other people see in MacLeod's
approach. Perhaps this level of pettiness and cynicism is an accurate
depiction of what it's like inside left-wing political movements. (What an
appalling condemnation of left-wing political movements, if so.) But many
of the on-line reviews lead me to instead conclude that people's
understanding of "political fiction" is stunted and superficial. For
example, there is almost nothing Marxist about this book it contains
essentially no economic or class analysis whatsoever but MacLeod uses a
lot of Marxist terminology and sets half the book in an explicitly
communist state, and this seems to be enough for large portions of the
on-line commentariat to conclude that it's full of dangerous, radical
ideas. I find this sadly hilarious given that MacLeod's societies tend, if
anything, towards a low-grade libertarianism that would be at home in a
Robert Heinlein novel. Apparently political labels are all that's needed
to make political fiction; substance is optional.
So much for the politics. What's left in Clovis's sections is a classic
science fiction adventure in which the protagonist has a radically
different perspective from the reader and the fun lies in figuring out the
world-building through the skewed perspective of the characters. This was
somewhat enjoyable, but would have been more fun if Clovis had any
discernible personality. Sadly he instead seems to be an empty receptacle
for the prejudices and perspective of his society, which involve a lot of
quasi-religious taboos and an essentially magical view of the world.
Merrial is a more interesting character, although as always in this series
the romance made absolutely no sense to me and seemed to be conjured by
authorial fiat and weirdly instant sexual attraction.
Myra's portion of the story was the part I cared more about and was more
invested in, aided by the fact that she's attempting to do something more
interesting than launch a crewed space vehicle for no obvious reason. She
at least faces some true moral challenges with no obviously correct
response. It's all a bit depressing, though, and I found Myra's
unwillingness to ground her decisions in a more comprehensive moral
framework disappointing. If you're going to make a protagonist the ruler
of a communist state, even an ironic one, I'd like to hear some real
political philosophy, some theory of sociology and economics that she used
to justify her decisions. The bits that rise above personal animosity and
vibes were, I think, said better in
The Cassini Division.
This series was disappointing, and I can't say I'm glad to have read it.
There is some small pleasure in finishing a set of award-winning genre
books so that I can have a meaningful conversation about them, but the
awards failed to find me better books to read than I would have found on
my own. These aren't bad books, but the amount of enjoyment I got out of
them didn't feel worth the frustration. Not recommended, I'm afraid.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Dear Debian community,
this is bits from DPL for January.
Sovereign Tech Agency
I was recently pointed to Technologies and Projects supported by the
Sovereign Tech Agency which is financed by the German Federal
Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. It is a subsidiary of
the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, SPRIND GmbH.
It is worth sending applications there for distinct projects as that is
their preferred method of funding. Distinguished developers can also
apply for a fellowship position that pays up to 40hrs / week (32hrs when
freelancing) for a year. This is esp. open to maintainers of larger
numbers of packages in Debian (or any other Linux distribution).
There might be a chance that some of the Debian-related projects
submitted to the Google Summer of Code that did not get funded could be
retried with those foundations. As per the FAQ of the project:
"The Sovereign Tech Agency focuses on securing and strengthening open
and foundational digital technologies. These communities working on
these are distributed all around the world, so we work with people,
companies, and FOSS communities everywhere."
Similar funding organizations include the Open Technology Fund and
FLOSS/fund. If you have a Debian-related project that fits these
funding programs, they might be interesting options. This list is by no
means exhaustive just some hints I ve received and wanted to share. More
suggestions for such opportunities are welcome.
Year of code reviews
On the debian-devel mailing list, there was a long thread titled
"Let's make 2025 a year when code reviews became common in Debian".
It initially suggested something along the lines of:
"Let's review MRs in Salsa." The discussion quickly expanded to
include patches that have
been sitting in the BTS for years, which deserve at least the same
attention. One idea I'd like to emphasize is that associating BTS bugs
with MRs could be very convenient. It s not only helpful for
documentation but also the easiest way to apply patches.
I d like to emphasize that no matter what workflow we use BTS, MRs, or a
mix it is crucial to uphold Debian s reputation for high quality.
However, this reputation is at risk as more and more old issues
accumulate. While Debian is known for its technical excellence,
long-standing bugs and orphaned packages remain a challenge. If we don t
address these, we risk weakening the high standards that Debian is
valued for. Revisiting old issues and ensuring that unmaintained
packages receive attention is especially important as we prepare for the
Trixie release.
Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter
The Press Team has my full support in its decision to stop posting on X.
As per the Publicity delegation:
The 
Quick to deploy which is what I was after. My new 5m of coax with a choke fitted attached to the radio and we were off to the races - A convenient thing of beauty when it s up:
I ve made a single guy with a sotabeams 
Most of my Debian contributions this month were
For many years I wished I had a setup that would allow me to work (that is, code) productively outside in the bright sun. It s winter right now, but when its summer again it s always a bit. this weekend I got closer to that goal.
TL;DR: Using 
Passively lit coding
DeepSeek R1, the new entrant to the Large Language Model wars has created quite a splash over the last few weeks. Its entrance into a space dominated by the Big Corps, while pursuing asymmetric and novel strategies has been a refreshing eye-opener.GPT AI improvement was starting to show signs of slowing down, and has been observed to be reaching a point of diminishing returns as it runs out of data and compute required to train, fine-tune increasingly large models. This has turned the focus towards building "reasoning" models that are post-trained through reinforcement learning, techniques such as inference-time and test-time scaling and search algorithms to make the models appear to think and reason better. OpenAI&aposs o1-series models were the first to achieve this successfully with its inference-time scaling and Chain-of-Thought reasoning.
Another short status update of what happened on my side last
month. Mostly focused on quality of life improvements in phosh and
cleaning up and improving phoc this time around (including catching up
with wlroots git) but some improvements for other things like
phosh-osk-stub happened on the side line too.
Needless to say, speed is not everything. This PRNG comes the time of
32-bit computing so the generator period is likely to be shorter than
that of newer high-quality generators. If in doubt, forgo speed and
stick with the high-quality default generators.
The short NEWS entry follows.
Apparently somebody managed to 
Luckily Seagate has a proprietary extension "Seagate FARM (Field Access Reliability Metrics)" implemented in their disks that ... the crooks did not reset.
Luckily ... because other manufacturers do not have that extension. And you think the crooks only re-sell used Seagate disks? Lol.
The get access to the Seagate FARM extension, you need 
This year I have had a new look at the situation as we still use the LabelWriter Wireless printers a lot and the company runs fully on Linux. So it is always a chore to run a Windows VM just to run DYMO Connect.
A new maintenance release of 
Internationalization support in Picolibc
There are two major internationalization APIs in the C library:
locales and iconv. Iconv is an isolated component which only performs
charset conversion in ways that don't interact with anything else in
the library. Locales affect pretty much every API that deals with
strings and covers charset conversion along with a huge range of
localized information from character classification to formatting of
time, money, people's names, addresses and even standard paper sizes.
Picolibc inherits it's implementation of both of these from
newlib. Given that embedded applications rarely need advanced
functionality from either these APIs, I hadn't spent much time
exploring this space.
Newlib locale code
When run on Cygwin, Newlib's locale support is quite complete as it
leverages the underlying Windows locale support. Without Windows
support, everything aside from charset conversion and character
classification data is stubbed out at the bottom of the stack. Because
the implementation can support full locale functionality, the
implementation is designed for that, with large data structures and
lots of code.
Charset conversion and character classification data for locales is
all built-in; none of that can be loaded at runtime. There is support
for all of the ISO-8859 charsets, three JIS variants, a bunch of
Windows code pages and a few other single-byte encodings.
One oddity in this code is that when using a JIS locale, wide
characters are stored in EUC-JP rather than Unicode. Every other
locale uses Unicode. This means APIs like wctype are implemented by
mapping the JIS-encoded character to Unicode and then using the
underlying Unicode character classification tables. One consequence of
this is that there isn't any Unicode to JIS mapping provided as it
isn't necessary.
When testing the charset conversion and Unicode character
classification data, I found numerous minor errors and a couple of
pretty significant ones. The JIS conversion code had the most serious
issue I found; most of the conversions are in a 2d array which is
manually indexed with the wrong value for the length of each row. This
led to nearly every translated value being incorrect.
The charset conversion tables and Unicode classification data are now
generated using python charset support and the standard Unicode data
files. In addition, tests have been added which compare Picolibc to
the system C library for every supported charset.
Newlib iconv code
The iconv charset support is completely separate from the locale
charset support with a much wider range of supported targets. It also
supports loading charset data from files at runtime, which reduces the
size of application images.
Because the iconv and locale implementations are completely separate,
the charset support isn't the same. Iconv supports a lot more
charsets, but it doesn't support all of those available to
locales. For example, Iconv has Big5 support which locale
lacks. Conversely, locale has Shift-JIS support which iconv does not.
There's also a difference in how charset names are mapped in the two
APIs. The locale code has a small fixed set of aliases, which doesn't
include things like US-ASCII or ANSI X3.4. In contrast, the iconv
code has an extensive database of charset aliases which are compiled
into the library.
Picolibc has a few tests for the iconv API which verify charset names
and perform some translations. Without an external reference, it's
hard to know if the results are correct.
POSIX vs C internationalization
In addition to including the iconv API, POSIX extends locale support
in a couple of ways:
With all the recent buzz about