The etiquette of book reviews calls for a tone of balanced appraisal. The reviewer who loves a book is supposed to point out its flaws; the reviewer who hates one is supposed to discover its virtues. I've always attempted to cultivate this tone in my reviews—no doubt with less success than I would like to imagine! But Ken MacLeod's new book is beyond my powers. All I can do is tell you why I like it as much as I do.

To start with, MacLeod does, with ease, something few other writers are capable of: he writes from the viewpoint of brilliantly intelligent characters in a way that captures how such people actually think and feel. Ayn Rand, for example, wrote about highly intelligent characters; sometimes, indeed, about characters almost superhumanly brilliant. But she seldom put the reader into the middle of their thought processes; she stated their conclusions but didn't trace the paths by which they reached them. One of the few twentieth century writers who could do this was James Joyce. Ken MacLeod is another, especially in his portrait of Myra Godwin-Davidova, "The Deliverer."

MacLeod also does a brilliant job of world-building, portraying a future at once unexpected and startlingly logical. Consider his description of Jane's Market Forces, "a publicly available, but prohibitively expensive, real-time survey of military deployments around the world." MacLeod envisions the establishment of futures markets trading in military outcomes, like Italian Re naissance mercenaries working out who would win a battle and avoiding the inconvenience of actually fighting it. His global political system is neither a copy of some past century, nor a confrontation of good and evil; it follows its own logic of historical necessity.

At the same time, MacLeod and his characters are aware of political and economic theory in a very sophisticated way. He is capable of showing Myra Godwin-Davidova and another ex-Marxist, at the Institute for the Study of Post-Civilized Societies, debating how to interpret a line written by Mises.

Not many libertarians understand how Marxists think, and probably fewer Marxists understand how libertarians think; but MacLeod understand both When he alludes to the economic calculation debate in Eastern Europe, its issues seem to be living ones for him. This book apparently completes the series that includes The Star Fraction The Stone Canal, and The Cassini Division. Its incidents interlink with the other three books; for example, we see Myra give a group of imprisoned Asian dataworkers the classics of egoist philosophy from which the "true knowledge" of The Cassini Division is to spring. It's a fitting summation and a reason to look forward to the author's further work.