Powell, Gareth L. Ack-Ack Macaque. Ack-Ack Macaque No. 1. Solaris, 2012.
I enjoyed Gareth Powell’s Embers of War series and his recently released Stars and Bones, all of which I found quirky and original. It was no surprise, then, to find these same qualities in his earlier alternate history sci-fi fantasy, Ack-Ack Macaque. The novel was spun off from a 2008 short story in Interzone, and I was pleased to find a copy of it in the Extras section at the end of the novel. The story is set in an alternate near future that split from our timeline in 1956 when England and France merged into a single monarchic state called Brittany. A hundred years later, there are plans to colonize Mars. An infant technology that allows a personality to be downloaded into an implanted chip called a “soul catcher” is gaining popularity, and there are efforts to develop androids into which the soul catcher can be downloaded if the owner’s body dies. An immersive holographic game based on the World War II air war has become a national craze. It features, Ack-Ack Macaque, a long-tailed monkey who chomps cigars and flies Spitfires against gamers playing as Nazi pilots and tries his best to defend the incompetent gamer pilots on his side. The monkey’s uplifted personality is powered by the AI in the game. You win the game if you can shoot the monkey down. No one has. Meanwhile, there is a mystery in which a man with a soul catcher has been murdered and his brain and attached soul catcher have been removed. His ex-wife, an investigative reporter who lives on dirigible, is on the killer’s trail. The novel has the same verve I find in the best steampunk, but with robots and artificial intelligence instead of steam. Fun. Four stars. ( )

This one ticks a lot of steampunk/dieselpunk boxes - Zeppelins, an alternate history with political union with France that somehow keeps Britain as Top Nation, a conspiracy involving the Royal family, ocean liners and electric Citroens. Except that in chapter 1, an electric Citroen had a clutch and gearbox. And there was a severe slip in the dialogue where one character probes a detective's conversation about a murder suspect and questions why the suspect has been referred to as "him" - except they haven't been. I thought this boded ill, but once we were introduced to the eponymous Ack-Ack Macaque, things improved (possibly because he spoke to me in the voice of Ron Perelman in 'Hellboy').

Ack-Ack Macaque is a gun-toting, Spitfire-flying pilot in a video game. He has an eyepatch and a permanent cigar. He is quickly revealed to be an avatar of an actual monkey, given brain augments to try to find a cheaper route to AI. Once liberated from the video game, he becomes the counter-conspiracy's secret weapon.

The story moves fairly fast (assisted by quite short chapters) and the level of invention doesn't really flag. Yet for all that the story was supposed to be set in 2059, I kept feeling as though I was in another bit of fantastic film - Goddard's 'Alphaville', where the dialogue is all about spaceships, computers and interplanetary politics, but the visuals are 1966 Paris in luminous monochrome. Little of the description in this novel suggested we were in the future, just a present day with some different, albeit cool, gadgets.

And then in chapter 18, we are shown the effects of global warming in the form of flooded coastal areas. How come no-one mentioned that before?

There are plots to create a zombie android army; and another plot to seize power by subverting the personality of the Prince of Wales. Why do so many people think that controlling the British monarchy would result in a transfer or seizure of political power? Mr. Powell should go and look up "constitutional monarchy" and see how long we've had one of those - a lot longer ago than 1959, when this world's history diverges from ours.

It kept me entertained for a few evenings, and Monsieur Macaque himself was a pleasant surprise. And yet: this won the British Science Fiction Association's Award for best novel in 2013, jointly with Ann Leckie's 'Ancillary Justice'. The Leckie is a tour de force of mind-stretching ideas; her 'Ancillary' series of books were the first in years to actually engage what old-time fans called "a sense of wonder", for me at least. But a considerable number of people thought that this book was the best thing to appear in the UK that year; to which I say "Is that seriously the best we can do?" ( )

Fast paced and extremely readable but I felt the mystery part could have been stronger. ( )

Ack-Ack Macaque is a fast-paced romp which reminds me a bit of the kind of plotlines you see in Doctor Who. It's set in the future of an alternate universe where Britain and France united in the 1960s, and features nuclear-powered zeppelins, brain implants enabling computer-augmented existences as well as back-ups of people's consciousness, and a world-famous elite VR video game (the eponymous Ack-Ack Macaque).

The book is more grown-up than your average episode of Doctor Who, but most of its happenings would not be out of place in a two-parter of that show (and honestly, the harebrained scheme of the main antagonists – which involves creating an army of robots with the uploaded consciousnesses of real people, hijacking the British monarchy, and starting a nuclear conflict of China to wipe out the human race – sounds like it totally could've come from an abandoned Doctor Who episode). Its cast would not be out of place, either – a brain-augmented journalist, the back-up of her murdered ex-husband, the Prince of Wales, the “digital rights activist” (heavily modelled on real-world vegan activists) who's the Prince of Wales' secret girlfriend, an expert gamer and hacker named K8… and of course Ack-Ack Macaque himself, a monkey augmented to make him a grizzled, cigar-smoking, superhuman fighting machine.

Anyway… the book as a whole is enjoyable enough, hence the three stars. The main problem I had with it, I think, is that I really struggled to suspend my disbelief enough to get invested in what was happening. The villains' motivations were not very believable and I couldn't take them seriously, which meant I didn't feel the stakes. Sort of like how in Doctor Who, the Doctor and his companions get into all kinds of potentially universe-destroying danger every week, but unless there's been a season-long running theme of ominous warnings, you can count on nothing going seriously wrong.

If not for the fact that I'd bought the whole trilogy as an omnibus for cheap, I'd be pretty content to leave the series here (unlike Powell's other series, Embers of War, which is excellent!). Because I have bought the omnibus though, I probably will return in the future to read the further adventures of Ack-Ack Macaque. Probably as palate cleansers after books that are more emotionally taxing. ( )

I really wanted to like this. It's got all these cool characters and SF ideas that I should enjoy. A woman with a head full of tech and a dead ex-husband. A Russian captaining an airship, beholden to no state. An evil conspiracy, a way to cheat death, a Prince, his lover and his Machiavellian mother.

And the monkey, of course. Ack-Ack is brilliant.

But... The execution leaves something to be desired.

Too many plot-holes for a start. The super-high-tech centre really has no alarm, no guards to back up the easily defeated drone? Ack-Ack and Victoria have the run of that ship once they've escaped, no guards to spot them, no cameras, but this is where the elite are gathered and there's a terrorist threat.

Lots of things like that made no sense. Unless it's meant to be a parody, in which case the comedy went right over my head and I didn't laugh once. But I did quite often feel I was reading a pale prose version of a great, slightly silly, slightly over-the-top anime. All those scenes on top of the airship, Victoria practising with her quarterstaff, Ack-Ack flying a WWII spitfire, the Dr's doll... All great visuals there.

The writing is patchy in places too. Little things like Victoria seemed to have three hands in one of the fights, too much repetition of things we already know, yet glossing over details like how exactly K8 is hacking into the game. And, probably unfairly given it's 7 years old now, the ideas didn't seemed that original to me either.

So not one for me, I'm afraid. I remember reading the original short story in Interzone though, and that was great. ( )