Puff puff pass, Dino-buddy (hints, no spoilers)

"You're not here. Try to remember this."

Once I read these first two lines, I knew that the ride written before me would be a bumpy one, indeed - but never did I expect to be plunged through the needle-eye of a cosmic syringe into...madness, it seemed. I was so confounded and impressed by the imagery of the prologue that I read it aloud to friends (which very nearly resulted in a horrific traffic accident) so that I would not be alone in my speculations. We discussed the possibilites of hyperspace and the hallucinatins of a schizophrenic; we discussed the maybes of a miniature universe. But that was all before the talking dinosaurs and weed walked into the picture.

What I first found most striking about this book was the sense of duality that Ken MacLeod provided in plot and details. In the basest level, the chapters alternate from deep future to near future, with the main characters being, respectively, Nth-great-grandson and Nth-great-grandfather. On the deeper levels of plot, the grandfather, Matt Cairns, sets in motion the gears of human space exploration, while the grandson, Gregor Cairns (whose name is crafted from the beauty of irony) is a result of said human space exploration. Gregor and Matt's roles in the book can be further expounded, but we'll save that for later.

To further that sense of duality, Cosmonaut Keep shows us a future with dinosaurs (talking and otherwise), trilobytes, and space-faring krakens; it offers multiple genres of fiction (a breadth of sci-fi, a smattering of spy-thriller, a plate-full of political speculation, a smidge of romance, and a heap of cyberpunk); two love interests per main character; and what I consider to be most profound, because of its extreme likelihood, is the fact that Gregor's future society of man seems to be less technologically advanced than that of Matt's post-modern society. Within that fact, even, is another duality, in that Gregor's future has limited access to the uber-tech of the past - Nova Babylonia versus Mingulay.

But what I found most refreshing was the casual use of marijuana throughout the book. Not many authors would think to make this kind of popular cultural phenomenon into an integral part of their novel, let alone one of the few themes to tie future and future-future together.