Chris reviewed The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod (Fall Revolution, #1)
Between Socialism and Barbarism
4 stars
Rosa Luxemburg said that humanity’s choice lay between Socialism and Barbarism. In 21st-century England, a patchwork of statelets with varying ideologies, things are a lot less clearly defined. The Green barbarians are outside the walls, while the space program is exporting human intelligence to the stars in the form of independent AIs. For Moh Kohn, political streetfighter and armed guard whose allegiances lie in a distinctly libertarian direction, the past is a shifting mass of loyalties and betrayals that are all of a sudden beginning to reach out and prod him once again. When he’s not carrying out security contracts for the Felix Dzerzhinsky Collective with the help of his AI-controlled gun, he spends a lot of his time in his head replaying the assassination of Trotsky, which he identifies with the mysterious death of his own father, old-school Trot and computer genius Josh Kohn. But before he died, Kohn …
Rosa Luxemburg said that humanity’s choice lay between Socialism and Barbarism. In 21st-century England, a patchwork of statelets with varying ideologies, things are a lot less clearly defined. The Green barbarians are outside the walls, while the space program is exporting human intelligence to the stars in the form of independent AIs. For Moh Kohn, political streetfighter and armed guard whose allegiances lie in a distinctly libertarian direction, the past is a shifting mass of loyalties and betrayals that are all of a sudden beginning to reach out and prod him once again. When he’s not carrying out security contracts for the Felix Dzerzhinsky Collective with the help of his AI-controlled gun, he spends a lot of his time in his head replaying the assassination of Trotsky, which he identifies with the mysterious death of his own father, old-school Trot and computer genius Josh Kohn. But before he died, Kohn senior persuaded the world at large to use a free computer program called Dissembler, and Moh and others are waiting for the program to stop dissembling and do something. Years earlier, a meeting with Logan, an Esperanto-speaking militant spacerigger, provided a reference to something called the Star Fraction, and now the name is coming back into circulation.
Meanwhile Jordan Brown, seventeen years old and dissatisfied, leaves the religious enclave of Beulah City - the former Islington - for the bright lights and strangenesses of NorLonTo - North London Town, where anything goes, for a price; he finds a new world on the far side of the fence, less safe but much more satisfying. And Janis Taine, scientific researcher, finds her laboratory burnt down and herself persona non grata by dint of her association with the wrong stripe of people. The Men In Black are on her case. For every AI that is trying to come to consciousness on the right side there has to be one on the other side too. Somewhere in the Net there lurks the Black Plan; a Neuromancer-like AI that is often believed to be nothing more than a myth. But once activated it is as implacable as the Furies.
This is an information-rich society and Usenet seems to still be flourishing, with newsgroups such as theories.conspiracy, fourth.internat, and alt.long-live-marxism-leninism-maoism-gonzalo-thought, providing the Felix Dzerzhinsky Collective with its newsfeed. In some ways this novel partakes heavily of the cyberpunk era; there are overtones of Snowcrash and Neuromancer, but there is also the political edge, the fascination with the revolutionary Left without being entirely taken in by it. For MacLeod’s struggling characters, cyberspace is the fifth-colour country, ‘the new America’ though that can be seen many ways, too big and diverse to come under State control. Information is freedom; a limitless resource does not need to be controlled. The publisher seems to be pushing the similarities with Iain M Banks for this novel, and that is one place where the parallel is justified: Banks’s Culture relies upon near-inexhaustible natural resources for its freedom; money is a sign of rationing and as such of poverty. It’s true that both Banks and MacLeod are Scots, both write meaty SF thrillers from a Left political viewpoint, but parallels can be overdone. For example, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars novels approach the traditional venues of space opera from a more radical political stance, and unlikely parallels can be drawn with Heinlein over the idea of ‘space for those who want it.’
The cover on this edition is truly disappointing. It is a black-grey-and-white affair showing a kind of robot dog with glowing eyes, similar perhaps to the Rat Thing in Virtual Light. Given the tone and events of the book, my choice for cover art would be a mock-heroic painting of the scene depicted on page 86: a demonstration and picket line outside the spaceport at Alexandra Port. Although the novel takes place on Earth, space bulks large in the story. It is the next frontier; perhaps the natural environment of mankind, for as Moh tells the libertarian space-proselytist (David Brin?) Wilde, "like Engels said, Man’s natural environment doesn’t exist yet. He has to create it for himself." Prosaically, Engels argued that the proto-hominid apes adopted an upright posture and were able to use tools, and the result of tool use was the development of language and the accelerated evolution of the brain. He also believed that those same development and evolution continue: because humankind is capable of imagining changes to its environment, it is blessed or cursed with the need to go on changing, creating itself as it creates the world around it.
