I give it a hour, couldnt read anymore. Very poor premiss. ( )

Let's do a bit of time-travelling. In early 1990s east coast Scotland, two friends meet to discuss their efforts at writing a breakthrough science fiction novel. One is Iain Banks, already tipped as an up-and-coming, if controversial, young novelist, who is trying to sell a revised version of a science-fiction novel he wrote some time back. The other is Ken MacLeod, who has yet to make his first sale. Over a series of pints, sometimes in a pub in the shadow of the mighty Forth Bridge, they discuss publishing, writing, the awfulness of the Tory government, the possible future course of socialism, the role of 9-to-5 jobs in a modern post-industrial globalised economy and the state of science fiction. The author photograph on the dust jacket back flap of his first novel shows MacLeod as a typical Leftist rough-and-ready activist. And out of this fervent came that novel, 'The Star Fraction'.

It is a cyberpunk take on factionalist Leftist politics in a balkanised 21st century Britain. In 1995, when the novel was published, this was still a possible future (though it would take a major leap of faith to imagine the fragmented far Left achieving the level of boots-on-the-ground presence that MacLeod imagines). Now, more than twenty years on, this reads more like an alternative history, where Tony Benn was a philosopher, not a politician, and a state of open - and semi-legal - warfare exists between the State, a revolutionary army deposed from power by a resurgent monarchy, various statelets and their organs of state control, the USA, the UN, and a patchwork of revolutionary militias and mercenaries. The main protagonist, for example, is a mercenary security operative for the Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers' Defence Collective; other organisations are equally appropriately named. In the 1970s, one British trade union was likened to Beirut; think of the Lebanese civil war and you will begin to understand the complexity of the world MacLeod has created. There are fundamentalist religious groups, political groups, anarchists, all the shades of Leftists you can imagine and special forces of all allegiances and none. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, as someone once said.

The said protagonist carries a modified Kalashnikov for which the phrase "the gun spoke" is, for once, not a metaphor. He gets involved with a research scientist working on neural biochemistry. There are antiheroes and villains, AIs and love stories. It will help the reader if they have at least some familiarity with the British Left; not just the trade union movement and the Labour Party, but other groupuscules and parties, the iconographic texts of the Left and individuals such as Tony Cliff and John Pilger (just two of the journalistic icons namechecked in the book amongst many more). It helps if you know that in some circles, Leo Trotsky is (still) referred to as "the Old Man", or if you can sing the words to "Red fly the banners, O!"

Having said all that, the story itself is reasonably straightforward once you accept the premise of the balkanised Britain, can cope with multiple viewpoint characters, and are happy with what turns out to be a fairly standard cyberpunk plot underneath all the subversiveness. Technology is resolutely mid-1990s, extrapolated, but bears a strong resemblance to the earlier works of William Gibson. The text is riddled with allusions, puns and references. The pace is fast.

MacLeod's later novels calm down somewhat, and in those books he does not wear his political heart so much on his sleeve. But in this first outing, you get the unadulterated raw Left-wing spirit. ( )

The story was hard for me to follow. Don't know if it was the writing, the style or just hard for me to follow multiple characters. ( )

Having read a number of Ken MacLeod's more recent books, I've now gone back to his first novel The Star Fraction. Although the emergence of praeterhuman artificial intelligence is key to the plot, the book is far more focused on the political than the technological, and the few retrospective technological clinkers (typical of the cyberpunk of the late 20th century) in no way dampen the political imagination and its relevance to readers more than twenty years after its original publication.

The chief characters of the book are a "security mercenary" and a research scientist, and the setting is a balkanized England of "micro-states" subject to the US/UN after a Third World War of the 2020s. The story is fast-paced, with intrigue predominant over still-present sex and violence, but a prior appreciation of 20th-century revolutionary and imperialist projects is important for the reader's understanding. The villains are a little overdrawn in a way that sometimes verges on the comic, but they are often as absorbing as the protagonists.

This book is tagged as the first in "The Fall Revolution," a set of novels in a shared history, with varying timelines. It falls just a bit short of the work of MacLeod's I read in the "Engines of Light" series, or the standalone Newton's Wake, but it's still very good, and I'm sure I'll go on to read others in the sequence.

From the beginning, MacLeod's novel is bound up in political ideologies, philosophy, and various factions of rebels and idealists. And, at heart, this is the problem within the novel. More important than plot or character, it seems that MacLeod wants to explore ideas and logical progressions from historical changes, as wrapped up in Marxist philosophy, socialism, and capitalism. Nothing works, and the characters and scientific developments along the way are alternately stuck in the middle or fighting multiple systems at once. While the ideas here, and many of the scenes and characters as well, are interesting and engaging, there's never enough focus on character or the plots of here-and-now (as opposed to historical or ideological or political, as the case may be) in the novel for readers to really gain a footing of interest.

Was I entertained? At many points, I was, just as I was often impressed by the twists and turns MacLeod put together. But was I so engaged that I had to turn the page, or that I was anxious that a particular character triumph or discover some truth? No. And, sadly, I don't really feel the need to pick up the next piece in the series. I can acknowledge MacLeod's accomplishments in this piece, but for me, I desperately needed less theory and political argument, and a bit more development of the characters who might have made me care more about their ideals. Simply, I think that the book just took on too much in this first installment of the series. ( )