Name: Gavin's review of The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod
Item: The Star Fraction
Rating: 3
Author: Gavin

Ken MacLeod

In a newer world order where the peace process is deadlier than the wars ... Moh Kohn is a security mercenary with a smart gun, reflexes to die for and memories he doesn't want to reach. Jamis Taine is a scientist with a new line in memory drugs, anti-tech terrorists on her case and the STASIS cops on her trail. Jordan Brown is a teenage atheist with a guilty conscience, a wad of illicit cash and an urgent need to get a life. Between them they've started the countdown to the final confrontation, as the cryptic Star Fraction assembles its codes, the Army of the New Republic prepares its offensive and Space Defence lines up its laser weapons for the hour of the Watchmaker ...

The Star Fraction

Stephen Campbell

In a turbulent twenty-first-century Britain ruled by an absentee Hanoverian royal family and controlled by US/UN technology cops, security mercenary Mohn Kohn; Janis Taine, a scientist on the run from the US/UN; and Jordan Brown, a teenage refugee from a religious fundamentalist cult, become caught up in a series of events, controlled by a rogue computer program, that could change the world. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Gavin

Remarkable book, mining Marxism’s great SF potential at last. Deeply politically incorrect somehow. I skipped Macleod until now, assuming that I already had the Scottish radical SF angle from Banks. But this is completely different. It’s detailed and tragic and filled with left self-sabotage. Clearly written by someone who has spent one too many evenings in vitriolic, pedantic, and useless Organising meetings.

  Stone hauled a tattered tabloid from the inside of his jacket and spread it on the table.
‘Red Star,’ Stone said. ‘It’s a bit extreme, but some of the things they say make sense. Thought you might be interested, Moh.’
Does it show? Kohn wondered wildly. Is there some mark of Cain branded on my forehead that identifies me to everybody else, no matter what I say or don’t say, no matter how much I want to put it all behind me? He picked the paper up reluctantly, took his shades off to read. There it was, the banner with the strange device: a hammer-and-sickle, facing the opposite way from the traditional Soviet one, with a ‘4’ over the hammer.
He didn’t read beyond the masthead.
‘The only red stars I know about,’ he said, ‘are dead, off the main sequence, and consist mostly of faintly glowing gas.


Why Marxist fiction (and not Marxist politics)?: the grand conflicts, the frustrated utopian futurism, the sweat and blood, the technology-first view of history. And also a lot of literary potential in the dwarfed, self-defeating, and famously speciated real-life cadres. Macleod includes aching details about British leftist culture - calling your parents by their first name, Levi jackets as some kind of statement, the pompous set phrases of resistance ("comrades, this is no accident"), the paranoid tint the whole world takes when history is your foe. I miss the sincerity and spurious clarity, the cussed, blessed obliviousness to which century it is.

  The lunchtime crowd was so noisy she no longer noticed it, nor the wall-covering black-and-white portraits of Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill and Bobby Sands and Wei Jingshen and others to whose memory various factions had successively dedicated the place…

Others moved through the shadows of the trees around him and he recognized them, the old comrades, the dead on leave: John Ball in his rough robe, Winstanley building a hut in a clearing, Tom Paine slipping him a wink as he and Blake stepped over the sleeping Bunyan; Harvey and Jones, Eleanor Marx and Morris….


The foreword is essential reading - KM reveals himself to be a rare bird, a leftist who understands the dreadful force of Mises’ calculation argument.

  Unfortunately, there’s no reason why the Economic Calculation Argument and the Materialist Conception of History couldn’t both be true. What if capitalism is unstable, and socialism is impossible? 


As a result, the main conflict in this is not socialism vs capitalism (the ancap zone is the nicest place in the book) but progress vs primitivism and resistance vs (American and UN) empire

  There were times when Kohn loathed the Left, when some monstrous stupidity almost, but never quite, outweighed the viciousness and venality of the system they opposed. Ally with the barbarians against the patricians and praetorians… think again, proletarians!… His co-op had lived by defending what he still saw as the seeds of progress – the workers’ organizations and the scientists and, if necessary, the capitalists – against the enemies of that modern industry on which all their conflicting hopes relied…

(She’d often wondered just what molecule or compound was responsible for hysteria and ineducability in the middle classes: it must have seeped into the food-chain sometime in the nineteen-sixties, and become ever more concentrated since.)

‘Fuck them and their nazi economics.’ He punched his palm. ‘Protection. Conservation. Restriction. Deep ecology. Give me deep technology any day. They don’t scare me. I’m damned if I’ll crawl, my children’s children crawl on the earth in some kind a fuckin harmony with the environment.

…a permanent party – in both senses, an occasion and an organization of the privileged


The OTT cynicism about the UN here contrasts well with the soppy treatment of the last fictional UN I encountered (Ada Palmer’s wise ancient saviour order).

The antagonists are done well. They're actually fighting to prevent billions of people dying, and their plan is (view spoiler)[actually the exact same as the one executed by The Gun deus ex machina. They also have some sense of AI x-risk, unlike the happy go lucky protagonists. (hide spoiler)]

The AI stuff is good, and the antagonists are suitably scared of it. (view spoiler)[The expert system architecture is quaint but he did his best. The death of the AI civilisation, billions of apparently sentient and highly enhanced minds is not treated very seriously, not half as seriously as losing Moh alone. But I suppose they are easier to redo than humans. (hide spoiler)]
Yep:
 the whole [AI] rumour was so apocalyptic that she had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who’d faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn’t happen or didn’t happen here or didn’t happen to people like them. But she also knew there would be no end of false alarms, lying wonders, false prophets with a Lo! here and a Hi! there, before whatever the real thing was came along. Indeed, they were part of the reason why the real thing always came like a thief in the night or… like a secret policeman in the early hours of the morning. 

There are limits to Macleod’s scepticism. Trotsky looms large here as a wise prophet (never mind his own peasant-murdering and purely opportunistic democratic pivot).

  ‘I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and a clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.’
The gentle words, harshly spoken in a polyglot accent, made Kohn’s eyes sting.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We haven’t done very well.’
The Old Man laughed. ‘You are not the future! You – you are only the present.’

(view spoiler)[And the revolution wins, brutal and repressive as it instantly becomes. (hide spoiler)]

Also notable for a negative portrayal of Archipelago, voluntary ideological nations with exit rights. The only real critique is that they war on each other all the time (millions of deaths a year), and indoctrinate their subjects so that people don’t exercise their exit rights. Looking at real-life migration patterns in the face of violent borders, few authoritarian regimes have so far managed to indoctrinate so successfully.

   New Situationists, Alternative Luddites (they wore space-rigger gear and blew up wind-power plants), Christianarchists, cranks, creeps, commies, tories – all had had their say, in colour.


Macleod is aware that the themes in this 1995 book aged badly in the next decades - revolution lost its hold even among radicals, American hegemony beclowned itself, and the greens took over the left.

  And closer to hand, nearer than infinity, she could see the other free wheels turn. Stars and stripes and hammers and sickles flaunted their fading colours to the real stars that held no promises, only hopes and endless, endless lands. 

More mind candy than Grand Synthesis, but a strong first novel anyway.

In a Britain ruled by an absentee royal family and controlled by US/UN technology cops, security mercenary Moh Kohn, scientist Janis Taine, and teenager Jordan Brown become caught up in a series of events that could change the world.

Fraser Simons

“…It bordered Norlonto in a high-intensity contrast between freedom and slavery, war and peace, ignorance and strength. Which was which depended on whose side you were on.”

Another world war and multiple revolutions set the stage for The Star Fraction. The world is balkanized, allowing for many different factions and groups to claim space, their ideological viewpoints fermenting in a cycle that merely shuffles power around in the same oppressive structures we see today; albeit taken to radicalized extremes in most cases. 

Moh Kohn lives in a commune, a co-op in which the mercenaries run protection details for a number of different groups, some of which are described as terrorists, only legalized. There’s a standard operating procedure and rules of engagement for these situations, but it’s overshadowed by a hefty amount of politics. Which the fiction attempts to expose and condemn the viewpoints of by taking them to their logical conclusion in which not much actually changes. 

“White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.”

When Kohn stumbles into a scientist, Janis, who has inadvertently created a drug which allows for vivid recall of memories, they trigger a cascading series of events that have the makings of a revolution, the resurgence of Kohn’s past, and the activation of an A.I previously only rumored, the Watchmaker. Of course, it also catalyzes other factions as they vie to come out on top of a powder keg ready to go up at any minute. 

The most interesting thing about The Star Fraction for me was Kohn’s past interwoven into the narrative, giving context to the ideological viewpoints of the other factions at the same time as explaining why Kohn is so disenchanted with each of them. The super identities created by peoples’ affiliations parallels the scarification and horrendous nature of war, touched upon often. 

“He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over, it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X- and Y- chromosomes.”

After all, this is a future in which Kohn’s customized and advanced gun aims him. Instead of a deck, his weapon is the main point of contact for everything that matters to him. His livelihood, his connection to others through this worlds’ cyberspace equivalent. He even talks to it like it’s a companion from time to time. And why not. The youth here put bullets behind their ideologies and rebellions. Grown men just boys with a past pushed from their minds, pulling triggers until they’re used up. In many ways, Kohn’s gun makes far more sense than the typical image of a deck or computer tower. 

“Terror has to be random...that's how to really break people, when they don't know what rules to follow to keep them out of trouble.”

It doesn’t matter how old you are. Ultimately, in The Star Fraction, only substantive changes come from solutions divorced from humanity. It’s an unsatisfying end, positioning itself to no ideological viewpoint because, when extrapolated, they serve only to reinforce oppressive power structures. Religion, communism, capitalism; the fiction is obsessive about talking about various aspects of them, but in the end, not much of it actually matters. The flow of the book is often stymied by it, or the withholding of catharsis might have similarly mattered. The twists and turns do it credit, though. The implications of the ending are the most interesting notions it puts forward and truly novel, in my experience.

“...maybe we can do better than this. And to ask yourself: where's the vulnerable point in this multiple-choice totalitarianism? It seems...seamless. What can an individual do against it?... I suggest that you doubt, disobey, desert. Particularly if you are called upon to fight against those who insist, against all the evidence, that we are one people.”

Content Warning for spoilers from this point onward. You have been warned!

From the very beginning, it turns out, the gun, a unique A.I awakened at an undetermined time, yet certainly given the final spark by the death of Moh Khan, was behind everything. The omnipresence orchestrating all of the death, including the protagonist, in service to a lasting change outside the grasp of human hands. We were told so from the beginning, actually. After all Khan’s gun aimed him from the very first confrontation. It had him stumble onto the memory drug to find out what it needed; helped the other A.I attempting to further a human’s agenda be killed; and positioned the other characters, Jordan and Cat, to help it/him do so. Believing it would be what Khan wanted. Based on the assimilation of Khan’s memories and other data as he was linked to the gun at death. 

“...I want to attack all these cults and ideologies. I have this, this vision that life could be better if only people could see how things really are. That it's your one life. It's yours, you have this inexhaustible universe to live it in and God damn it isn't that enough? Why do we have to wander around in these invented worlds of our own devising, these false realities that are just clutter, dross, dirt on the lens?--all these beliefs and identities that people throw away their real lives for.”

If the gun is to be believed, anyway. Since it is also the narrator of the story, introducing an unreliable narrator at the end. The sometimes-strange amount of time spent on factions is more interesting at that. If it’s all a fiction to justify the action, coloring the humanness of these ideologies and interactions as the downfall of true peace and revolution. It’s believable that it would be something with a hint of humanity in it but the inhumanity also, to allow for its “brothers and sisters”, so to speak, to die, as well as Kohn. Who would allow for such a thing but a weapon pointed at a human that needed more than Kohn to fire this particular bullet? 

“The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from AI-and-I to I-and-I.
There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors.

The stars threw down their spears.
Someone smiled. His work to see.

The connection broke.”

'He is writing revolutionary science fiction. A nova has appeared in our sky.' - Kim Stanley Robinson 'Engaged, ingenious, and wittily partisan, Ken MacLeod is a one-man revolution, SF's Billy Bragg' - ASIMOV'S SF In a newer world order where the peace process is deadlier than the wars ... Moh Kohn is a security mercenary with a smart gun, reflexes to die for and memories he doesn't want to reach. Jamis Taine is a scientist with a new line in memory drugs, anti-tech terrorists on her case and the STASIS cops on her trail. Jordan Brown is a teenage atheist with a guilty conscience, a wad of illicit cash and an urgent need to get a life. Between them they've started the countdown to the final confrontation, as the cryptic Star Fraction assembles its codes, the Army of the New Republic prepares its offensive and Space Defence lines up its laser weapons for the hour of the Watchmaker ... The debut novel from a major force in SF, the first of his novels to be shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Books by Ken MacLeod: Fall Revolution The Star Fraction The Stone Canal The Cassini Division The Sky Road Engines of Light Cosmonaut Keep Dark Light Engine City Corporation Wars Trilogy Dissidence Insurgence Emergence Novels The Human Front Newton's Wake Learning the World The Execution Channel The Restoration Game Intrusion Descent

Book One: The Fall Revolution Series

Jan Jackson

Nothing special. The characters were no more than shapes, and the politicising heavy-handed and overdone. The gun could have been interesting, but it wasn’t developed. Sort of Iain M. Banks crossed with David Lynch. I won. It didn’t.

Stephen Campbell &
The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod

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