Not that long ago I read The Sky Road and only found out it was the fourth and final volume of Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution sequence. But, library inventories being what they are, when I saw The Star Fraction, the first book in the series and his first novel, I picked it up anyway. He’s a good enough writer and I’ve read enough books in the intervening time to make this a non-issue. And I was right, it was worth reading and now I need to find The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division (so if you have a copy I can borrow…).
Macleod is a socialist, something he discusses in a brief “Introduction to the American Edition,” and he clearly forecasts a larger role for that and similar ideologies in the near future; I have yet to read a book of his which isn’t based on this social development. My personal beliefs are not so cut and dry but it hasn’t got in the way of my enjoyment, and he’s close enough to libertarianism to include that huge segment of science fiction fandom as well.
These novels are set in the years after a more or less global war known as the Fall Revolution, which happens in the late 2040s; twenty years before that is the Third World War (or “the War of European Integration, as its instigators call it”). Between them, they leave the world a set of fractured mini-states, the UN an American puppet organization and in the skies a Space Defense controlling satellite laser weapons whose primary mission is to prevent–with any means necessary–deep technology such as true artifical intelligence and weapons of mass destruction.
Unfortunately for these Men in Black, their systems cannot detect everything. In fact they missed a key achievement a generation earlier, though they thought they caught it by killing a key (Trotskyite) software developer. Josh Kohn had been able to release his nascent AI into the wilds of the Net but it was missing certain necessary codes which, as it happens, his now-grown son had stored away in the mists of memory. As this story opens the son, grown up into a hard-edged leftist mercenary leader, encounters a drug in a research lab he’s about to start protecting that releases the memory to the much-evolved software.
What I’ve written up to here is all setup and backstory. Macleod unleashes a wild amalgam of future tech and politics built around an intriguing quartet of main character, a compelling bit of writing. Makes me wonder what they had in the water in Scotland in the ’70s and ’80s.
recommended
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