The Sky Road divergence point

[avram]

I’ve finished rereading The Sky Road, and with it my second run through Ken MacLeod’s four-book Fall Revolution series. For folks who haven’t read it, here’s a brief chronological summary:

• The Star Fraction covers the events immediately leading up to and during the global event from which the series takes its name, the Fall Revolution, in the mid-21st century.
• The Stone Canal has two linked storylines. Odd-numbered chapters take place on a distant planet in the far future, cover several different characters, and are narrated in the third person. The even-numbered chapters are first-person accounts by one of the characters from the odd chapters; they start off in the 1970s and bring us up to the point where chapter 1 starts. Along the way they also cover the events of The Star Fraction, but some of the claims the narrator makes about the Revolution are wrong.
• The Cassini Division picks up shortly after where The Stone Canal leaves off.
• The Sky Road is the interesting one. It’s set in an alternate timeline, where the events of The Cassini Division and most of The Stone Canal never take place.

The first time I read these books it was a span of months or years between The Cassini Division and The Sky Road, so I somehow missed the point where the timeline splits off, but this time I saw it....

It’s pretty clearly tagged. Early in The Sky Road, David Reid offers to buy the ISTWR’s nukes, possibly the last strat-nukes left in the world. (Not quite the last, as it turns, out, but close enough that it’s important.) The scene where Myra turns down his offer is surrounded with her speculations about mirrors and alternate timelines, a pretty clear signal that this is the divergence point. The first time I’d read this, I’d somehow conflated this with the scene in The Stone Canal where Myra passes along to Jon Wilde the opportunity to sell his nuke deterrence contract to Germany, which would have changed the outcome of WW3, and he says no, but that takes place decades earlier.

Anyway, at the end of The Sky Road Myra uses her nukes to set off the orbital ablation cascade, killing off most of the anarcho-capitalist folks who in the main timeline went off to settle New Mars, and tipping the scale of the conflict between the Green barbarians (who then go on to take over the world) and the Sheenisov (who win and become the anarcho-communist Solar Union in the main timeline).

OK, now what do I read?