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Title: Massive Effort, But Still Falls Flat.
Review: If publishers were serious about their claim that the best style is one that is not noticed, Ken MacLeod would never have been published. MacLeod contorts the English language, in attempts to be witty, or perhaps iconoclastic, which invariably fall flat on their faces. His usage of alliteration is ludicrious. His style remains pretensious throughout, and most of the time unbearably so. In short, Cosmonaut Keep is a Herculean effort, in which MacLeod assures that the audience is always conscious of his effort.MacLeod does do some things very well: his imagination is vivid, and his ability to describe the world that he has created is wonderful. His balance of narrative and dialogue is excellent, but his characters never have anything to say. The storylines that he creates are interesting, but the linkage comes too late to save the drowning plot.If, as the cover proclaims, MacLeod represents a SF revolution unto himself, the genre is dead.
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