Ancestral Machines by Michael Cobley

Ancestral Machines by Michael Cobley is my first foray into this author’s body of work, but I understand it is set in the same universe as his Humanity’s Fire trilogy. I got the sense that there are references and linkages to this earlier work in Ancestral Machines. However, this space opera, set in a distant future populated by a multitude of cultures and beings, reads very much as a standalone. After reading this latest book from Cobley, I can say that I’m not overly desperate to go back to that earlier trilogy, having found this one quite cluttered and unengaging.

Brannan Pyke is a Scottish Han Solo, “a hardbitten, border-defying, sanctions-busting smuggler who laugh[s] in the face of boundary police”. He is a character who fits instantly within a familiar mold, despite the author’s attempt to add some colour by giving him a vocabulary that includes “ratbag”, “gouger”, “bollocks”, “feck” and other delightful Father Ted-isms. Pyke captains the Scarabus, “a Type-38 Ombilan transport”, which sports a motley crew that includes a scattering humans and alien beings; species with names like Henkayan, Egetsi, and Kiskashin.

The book hits the ground running, with Pyke and his crew betrayed following a trade rendezvous in orbit around the snowbound world of Nadisha II, on the outskirts of the Earthsphere. A group of leather-clad space barbarians (literally described as resembling extras from the set of an “exceptionally ultragothique glowactioner”), led by a seven-foot tall giant named Khorr, steal a cutting edge Sagramore Industries’ scanner from Pyke, and leave him and his crew for dead. Pyke’s lust for revenge leads him into a larger confrontation with Khorr’s masters, a group of five ruthless beings known as the Gun-Lords of Shuskar.

The biomechanoid Gun-Lords rule over an unprecedented feat of macroengineering once known as the Great Harbour of Benevolent Harmony; a spacefaring net of two hundred planets harnessed to an artificial sun. Originally built to travel through space as a monument to peace between alien species, the Great Harbour has been reconditioned since the Gun-Lords’ overthrow of the mysterious Builders, and it is now ominously known as the Warcage.

Using the awesome power of the Warcage, the Gun-Lords maraud the universe, capturing new planets for slaves and resources, and discarding old, ravaged worlds in their wake. The populations of the stolen planets are pitted against one another in eternal conflict designed to fuel the Gun-Lord’s war machine and sustain their power over the inhabitants of the Warcage.

The Warcage has also attracted concern from the Earthsphere and an intergalactic society of machine intelligences known as the Construct (think Iain M. Banks’ Culture). Lieutenant Commander Sam Brock is a talented and precocious operative with a propensity to rub her COs the wrong way. Brock is pulled from a dead-end job where she wiles away her time playing vintage computer games and is seconded under the command of an enigmatic drone named Rensik Estemil, in a joint Earthsphere and Construct intel operation to track down the Warcage and discern the intentions of the Gun-Lords.

Both Pyke and Brock eventually cross paths with Second Blade Akreen, a military leader of an alien race known as the Zavri. The Zavri are one of the numerous species occupying the planets within the Warcage, and constitute some of the Gun-Lord’s most loyal and efficient warriors. The Zavri are tall, silver skinned beings, half-flesh and half-machine, and each Zavri carries with them the digitised consciousness of their individual ancestors as spirit guides. Akreen’s mind is haunted by a particularly long line of precursors, who send him on a quest that intertwines with an emerging rebellion against the Gun Lords.

A comparison to Banks may seem superficial at first, with the book’s Scottish author (and protagonist) and the drone character from a utopian civilisation of machine minds. But like Banks before him, Cobley is certainly not intimidated by the possibilities of the space opera form. Cobley uses advanced technological features such as hyperdrives and inertia dampening shields to create a faster than light universe that feels massive in scope, compressing vast distances and jamming in multitudinous alien races.

There is no doubt that Cobley has a fecund imagination and Ancestral Machines is crammed full of more ideas on a single page than many novels contain over their entire length:

“And in her mind Dervla thought she could almost picture what was happening, two worlds pivoting around some unshifting point, one swinging out of its aeons-old orbit, the other swinging in to take its place. The gargantuan audacity of it was breath taking to her, even as she recognised the grim peril that they were all in.”

Both the imagery in this passage, and that particular phrase – “gargantuan audacity” – go some way to describe Cobley’s approach in Ancestral Machines.

Pyke’s rakish charisma and the interactions between his ragtag crew of misfits also invite easy comparisons to Firefly:

“‘Meet the Klossag, a triple-mode close assault weapon –fires energy bolts, 9.5mm slugs, and mini-grenades. I think the advert went something like: ‘When you really need to win an argument…’’”

A roguish sense of humour permeates this otherwise dark and violent story, which I think can be accuratley described as Whedon-esque.

However, while the book may appeal to fans of these works, for me, Cobley falls well short of their standard. Cobley’s everything but the kitchen sink approach to space opera creates a setting that lacks any impression of logical consistency. It also results in prose that is dense with neologisms and often reads like parody.

The stuffing in of too many ideas creates a rushed feeling to the book, despite its reasonable length, and the multitudinous action scenes are often resolved quickly and unsatisfyingly:

“The next twenty minutes were a disjointed sequence of crazed dashing for cover, hearing the hiss-stutter of particle energy bolts stitching holes across the decor, smelling burnt wood and melted plastic.”

This kind of glazing over and compression is typical for the book, and Cobley’s interest seems to be moving the reader onto the next scenario or set piece, never taking time to explore his own ideas.

This harried feeling spills over into the book’s thin characterisation. Relationships and alliances are formed and broken too neatly:

“Punzho’s bafflement seemed to reach cosmic proportions. ‘I have? It would?’ Then he caught the hard gleam in Pyke’s eye even as the captain continued to smile and nod. ‘Ah, right, yes . . . so . . . Brother Podjag, I am sorry for interrupting – what were you about to say?’”

These kinds of eye-rollingly clumsy and slapstick interactions between characters are far too common throughout the book. Truth be told, I felt none of the book’s characters were interesting or developed enough to care about.

In summary, I found Ancestral Machines to be a mélange of cluttered ideas, clotted prose, bland characterisation, and hurried action scenes. Not only did this book commit the sin of not engaging me as its reader, it failed to do so over many pages, exacerbating my frustration. This is a shame, as Cobley brings some fantastic invention and a real sense of wonder space opera to the table. Nevertheless, I had the impression reading Ancestral Machines that his ambition outreached his execution. A more focused effort in the future may bring me back to this author. As Captain Pyke says at one point in the book, “I really have had a bellyful of this dodging-death malarkey.”

Ancestral Machines by Michael Cobley
ISBN: 978 03565 01772
464 pages
Published by Orbit, January 2016
Review by Luke Brown

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