This omnibus edition of the three 'Ack-Ack Macaque' novels by Gareth Powell ticks a lot of steampunk/dieselpunk boxes. The first novel has 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?"

The second excursion for the cigar-chomping aviator monkey (who for me is still speaking in Ron Perelman's Hellboy voice), 'Hive Monkey', is great fun and has the occasional surprise. but equally some unnecessary info-dumping (an AI airship navigator in an alternate 2059 declares "We shall fly to Bath, which is so named for the Roman baths there") and a terrible tendency for Powell to not only recap events from earlier in the novel, or in the previous novel, but to keep on repeating those recaps!!

So many of the plot devices have been used before; the Gestalt are Star Trek's Borg in fancy suits, and there were lots of plot points that I could see coming a mile off. And I spotted at least one quote from 'Aliens'...

And it still suffers from the Alphaville effect; and yet, even then, there are issues. At one point, one of the characters is driving a Mercedes and it begins to rain, so they "...hit the wipers." Well, I used to drive a Mercedes that dated from 2002, and the wipers on that came on automatically when it started raining. In another instance, Ack-Ack Macaque shoots up an articulated lorry (strictly in self-defence) and Powell describes the driver's expression. I would have thought that by 2059, all lorries would be self-driving. It's not as though this book pre-dates the advances in automotive tech that will bring us these things...

Oh, and the action never strays north of the Thames Valley and M4 corridor, even when Ack-Ack acquires a flight of vintage Spitfires, which he has flying out of the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton, for some incomprehensible reason. The Fleet Air Arm never flew Spitfires, but its navalised variant, the Seafire; Yeovilton isn't an operational museum, so it doesn't have hangars - they all belong to the operational air base next door. If Powell was going to have a flight of Spitfires, they should have operated out of the Imperial War Museum's airfield at Duxford, just outside Cambridge, where there are restoration hangars.

(This may all sound like nerdy nit-picking; and I plead guilty. But I didn't put the nerdy stuff in - the author did. So he might as well have got it right. Cambridge should still be acceptably Home Counties.)

But despite all that, it was still fun.

The trilogy ends with 'Macaque Attack', which starts out as more of what we've had already, with the good stuff (Ack-Ack himself, massive nuclear-powered Zeppelins) and more of the not-so-good stuff (the repeated info-dumps, the Alphaville effect and the occasional curve ball thrown in - in this case, someone uses an "information crystal" to replay a recorded video, and I went "When did we get those?" because I don't recollect anyone mentioning information crystals up to now).

But we get new plot revelations thrown into the mix, and they come at us thick and fast. And Ack-Ack has an epiphany and turns from an uplifted monkey with a video game server running in his wetware to some sort of Flying Dutchman figure voyaging the infinite streams of human existence in search of something to blow up. This happens with quite indecent haste; the fate of the Anglo-French monarchy is almost consigned to a footnote in comparison. Not a satisfying end to a trilogy which really couldn't maintain the promise of the initial idea itself.

The omnibus includes a new coda which incorporates the ultimate destiny of Ack-Ack, and also the original 2007 short story that set Gareth Powell down this path. It's a very different tale that puts us in a world where Ack-Ack Macaque never leaves the game, and Everyone Loves The Monkey.

Ack-Ack Macaque

The cigar chomping No.1 ace Spitfire pilot of WWII and defender against incessant waves of Nazi ninja paratroopers is a monkey - code name Ack-Ack Macaque. If that doesn't on it's own make you want to read this book then I suspect it's not for you. But! There's more! Way more. Nuclear powered airships. Conspiracies. The Prince of Wales. Bad Facelift Man. A weird cult. Possible armageddon. A rocket to Mars. well, I don't want to mention all the fun stuff - let's leave some surprises.

My only complaint is that such an amazing title character really should have more time in his own book. Still, there are two more novels and a couple of shorts in this omnibus.

Hive Monkey

Another rip-roaring sci-fi adventure, this time with as much cyborg WWII flying-ace monkey as you could want! It moves along faster than Ack-Ack Macaque's Spitfire can fly, which is almost enough to make you not notice that the new characters and ideas are largely under-developed and unoriginal. It's over in a flash and it's fun but it's pretty flimsy.

Macaque Attack

Another bizarre mix of the original and the epically derivative as we get more unexpected revelations and gung-ho adventure with the now aging artificially enhanced macaque that likes beer, cigars and fighting those intent on genocide and universal domination. It's a fitting conclusion for the gun-toting monkey, even if some of the other characters' stories are left unresolved.

There's a bonus story that was the first to feature Ack-Ack, published prior to the novels. It has a different conception of the character and doesn't fit into the world of the novels, but it's a good story.