7.2 /10 1 Votes
Originally published 2000 Followed by Dark Light | 3.6/5 Goodreads | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Genres Fiction, Science Fiction, Speculative fiction Nominations Arthur C. Clarke Award, Hugo Award for Best Novel, Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel Similar Ken MacLeod books, Science Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Cosmonaut Keep (2000; US paperback ISBN 0-7653-4073-9), a science fiction novel by Ken MacLeod. It is the first novel in the Engines of Light Trilogy, a 2001 nominee for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for best novel.
In Cosmonaut Keep, MacLeod makes fleeting reference to a future programmers union called the "Information Workers of the World Wide Web", or the Webblies, a reference to the Industrial Workers of the World, who are nicknamed the Wobblies. The idea of the Webblies formed a central part of a later novel For the Win by Cory Doctorow, where it is given much greater prominence. MacLeod is acknowledged by Doctorow as coining the terms.
Literary significance and reception
Publishers Weekly had mostly praise for the novel saying:
MacLeod handles the strands of the plot deftly, weaving one beautifully realized world with the other and highlighting the parallels between the two. Rarely does a book demand so much of the reader and then deliver. Densely written with a remarkable depth of cultural texture, though occasionally confusing in its politics (which includes socialists, "Webblies" and libertarian capitalists), MacLeod's story is spoiled only by the false notes of two parallel love interests.