Book two of the fall revolution series follows two narratives - one on New Mars, set in a far future where an anarcho-capitalist post-singularity humanity is riven by arguments over machine personhood. The second thread follows the evolution of the frenemy relationship between the main characters, eventually joining with the future timeline towards the end of the novel.
That second thread is bogged down by its excessive politics – the twists and turns of different Python-esque factions become hard to track, motivations are confused, and it’s unclear how the protagonists came to be so pivotal. The future strand is much more engaging and enjoyable to read, exploring machine consciousness, nanotechnology, and post-scarcity society.
Macleod’s secondary characters feel less coherent and poorly integrated. Their motivations, such as Dee’s killing spree, are unclear and lack meaningful resolution. Promising set pieces like the courtroom drama fizzle out into a gunfight without delivering on the promise of a deeper exploration of machine rights. And the last fifty pages rush to pull everything together, with an expositional denouement that strips the resolution of its impact.
The Stone Canal is a marked improvement from The Star Faction, but still deeply flawed. Macleod asks interesting questions, but too often abandons them for meaningless action scenes or gets bogged down by didactic ideological debates rather than allowing its characters to embody them. The future timeline hints at the novel MacLeod could have written—one centred on posthuman identity and machine consciousness rather than increasingly convoluted political manoeuvring. Had it been told as a linear story, however, I doubt I’d have persevered long enough to reach it.
