The Restoration Game

In recent years, perhaps cowed by the success of The Matrix, science fiction writers have stepped back from exploring the idea that all we see and experience is somehow a dream. Eventually, though, somebody was bound to take a revisionist shot at one of SF and fantasy’s default scenarios.

Step forward Scottish writer Ken MacLeod, whose latest novel starts from the premise that our world is both a construct and the “most evil, unethical experiment you could imagine”. This doesn’t make it any less real to his heroine, Lucy Stone, who, stretching the idea of worlds within worlds further, works in the videogame industry in Edinburgh, but was born in Krassnia, part of the former USSR.

Commissioned by her mother, a CIA agent, to produce a role-playing game based on Krassnia’s history, Stone finds herself at the centre of increasingly bizarre events. These involve Stone’s own family history, post-Soviet realpolitik and computer code written in bad Latin.

Just keeping such disparate elements coherent is a triumph, but MacLeod never falters, creating a novel that’s both a hugely entertaining espionage thriller and, in its way, a treatise on how to live well in an uncertain world. He does all this while sneaking in some gloriously geeky jokes, including one about the underlying physics of our Universe being inconsistent – a dark matter indeed...

Jonathan Wright is a freelance science-fiction reviewer.