Newton's Wake: A Space Opera

The book was good, but not great. The problem seemed to be that it wanted to be a Big Ideas Action Adventure /and/ a satirical comedy, and didn't quite pull either off very well.

One character had most of the laughs, Ben Ami a playwright who styled himself after Shakespeare and produced amusingly awful plays that were still inexplicably popular. We hear references to plays such as “The Madness of George II, President of America” and his reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet that used genuine anti-aircraft guns which were a devil to insure. Unfortunately his “Leonid Brezhnev, Prince of Moscovy” is a little too good and sparks off a civil war amongst some Koreans, which is very distracting while he is trying to get permission to resurrect a couple of Scottish rockers for a “come-back” concert.

The other plotline follows Lucinda, a “Combat Archaeologist”, her job is to pass through wormholes to investigate ruins that are probably guarded by hyper-technology war machines in the hope of retrieving useful technology. In one such expedition (to Ben Ami's world) she accidently awakens a vast army of war machines. This character has her funny moments, but the plotline is decidedly not funny. I can say this with confidence because, aside from anything else I find it hard to imagine a plotline in which characters die from radiation sickness even slightly amusing.

This is the problem, both plots are OK, but it's the jumping between two totally different styles of story that really took the wind out of things. Just as I started rooting for Lucinda in her life and death struggle, I was treated to three pages of satirical chuckles at Brezhnev's expense. Then as I was just getting into the antics of the fish-out-of-water Scottish singers, suddenly we were back with Lucinda seeing a burnt out village with murdered children.

I'd say, good ideas, not so good in practice. If you liked the ideas I'd say read one of the following instead:
Strata by Terry Pratchett for the SF comedy
Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett for the funny playwright (and a thousand elephants!)
Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton for the action adventure and wormholes
Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge for AIs and ancient threats awakened

This book wasn't bad, but all of the above are way better.