OK, so I missed the deadline for the last Free Life.

The Star Fraction is the first science fiction novel by a long standing Libertarian Alliance subscriber Ken Macleod, and, I am pleased to say, is an enthralling and well written one.

I must confess that I started the book with trepidation. I have read far too many attempts at libertarian fiction, mainstream and SF, which are full of awkward and preachy passages of the sort:

"So what your telling me, Jack, is that in a truly free market economy, monopolisation is impossible?"

"That's right, Steve,as Rothbard has demonstrated in Man, Economy and State, monopoly can only occur ....etc" ad nauseam.

There's none of this sort of thing in The Star Fraction. In- stead, we have a skilful depiction of a very possible future world, a depiction not rendered in crude chunks of descriptive prose, but by gradual revelation in dialogue and plot background.

To avoid spoiling the reader's pleasure by giving too much of the plot away, I shall concentrate on outlining the fascinating background on the novel's portrayal of the future.

The world of The Star Fraction is a world in which there has been a qualified movement toward libertarianism. The United Kingdom, following an earlier and apparently semi-libertarian period under a Republic, has broken up into smaller "free states" and proprietorial communities, with a restored Windsor (Hanoverian) monarchy pretending to an overall authority. Some regions are libertarian but some are less so, indeed, some are repressive religious fundamentalisms. A real well-functioning free market community, Norlonto (North London Town), is a haven of diversity and sub- communities, their internal rules set by respective property owners (hence everything from women only areas, high risk no- rules areas, differing entry rules etc). But extreme communitarian repression is rendered impossible by the ubiquity of communications, both televisual broadcasting and the existence of the Internet.

On the world stage, a new global order is dominated by a corporatist and protectionist USA, which manipulates the UN, and which is involved in neo-mercantilist warfare with other powers, like Japan. The promise of technological and scientific progress is stultified, moreover, by US regulatory bodies who utilise hologram-enhanced agents in the guise of the "Men in Black" (part of the modern UFO mythos) to repress (by murder and terror if necessary) what they see as socially disruptive advances.

Individuals and communities and even political terrorists make use of private agencies of defence and retaliation, and a code of practice and arbitration has arisen between such agencies. Quite correctly, in my view, Ken predicts the world-wide rise of extreme environmentalist, technophobe and anti-industrial terrorists - "all the species of cranks and creeps" - referred to as the "Green Slime", an epithet whose adoption I urge on our comrades! How refreshing to hear characters making statements like:

"Fuck them and their nazi economics... Protection. Conservation. Restriction. Deep Ecology. Give me deep technology any day ... I'm damned if I'll crawl, my childrens' children crawl on the earth in some kind of fuckin' harmony with the environment. Yeah, till the next ice age or the next asteroid impact."

Such is the decline of Socialism that what is left of our old opponents is a "Left Alliance" that is now little more than a few groups who favour technology, industry and workers against the attacks of the Green Slime! Indeed, such has been the ideological dissolution of Communism that it is widely remembered in terms expressed by one character:

[S]he has what she knew was a commonplace notion that communists were basically OK, always banging on about markets and democracy and sensible stuff like that, whereas anything to do with socialism was a catastrophe that threatened the entire culture of mankind.

The book is full of humour. I particularly liked Jonathan Wilde's "counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by the identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists", and the fact that the exchange rate for an old political pamphlet that sells for £60 million is 20 Deutschmarks! And how about the political group the NF - "National Feminists", feminist nazi ecologists, who trace the origins of both "Patriarchy" and industrial civilisation to, you guessed it, the rootless cosmopolitans, and delight in pointing out the ethnic origins of the ideologists of both industrial socialism and capitalism ("Tony Cliff's real name was Ygael Gluckstein and Ayn Rand's was Alice Rosenbaum")

But enough. I hope I have wetted your appetite for this novel. I have only broached the abundance of deliciously ironic and insightful humour and largely ignored the equally perceptive technological speculation. Will the revolutionaries defeat both the US/UN corporatists, the Hanoverian Restoration and the hordes of environmentalist creeps and cranks? What is the truth behind the fears of an emergent, computer based form of electronic consciousness? And will the Republic, a libertarian oriented minimal state, prove a greater threat to liberty than the free statelets? For (at least some of) the answers, read Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction.

Chris R. Tame