Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [0]
THE STAR FRACTION
THE STONE CANAL
The Star Fraction
For Carol
Contents
INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
1. SMOKING GUNMAN
2. EVIDENCE FOR AEROPLANES
3. HARDWARE PLATFORM INTERFACE
4. NOT UNACQUAINTED WITH THE MORE OBVIOUS LAWS OF ELECTRICITY
5. THE FIFTH-COLOUR COUNTRY
6. THE SPACE AND FREEDOM PARTY
7. THE UPLOADED GUN
8. THE VIRTUAL VENUE
9. TO EACH AS HE IS CHOSEN
10. THE TRANSITIONAL PROGRAMMER
11. QUANTUM LOCALITIES
12. THE CITIES OF THE PRETTY
13. THE HORSEMEN OF THE APOCRYPHA
14. SPECTRES OF ALBION
15. EXPERT SISTER
16. THE EVE OF JUST-IN-TIME DESTRUCTION
17. THE GOOD SORCERER
18. THE AMERICANS STRIKE
19. DISSEMBLER
20. THE QUEEN OF THE MAYBE
21. WHAT I DO WHEN THEY SHOVE CHINESE WRITING UNDER THE DOOR
Acknowledgements
Introduction to the American Edition
The Star Fraction is the first of the Fall Revolution books and my first novel. I started writing it with no idea of where it would end up, let alone of making it the start of a series. It still isn’t: The four books can be read in any order, and the last two of them present alternative possible futures emerging from that midtwenty-first-century world I imagined at the beginning.
In this scenario, a brief Third World War—or War of European Integration, as its instigators call it—in the 2020s is followed by a US/UN hegemony over a balkanized world. The Fall Revolution in the late 2040s is an attempt to throw off this new world order and to reunify fragmented nations. But, as one of the characters says, ‘What we thought was the revolution was only a moment in the fall.’ His remark has a theory of history behind it.
History is the trade secret of science fiction, and theories of history are its invisible engine. One such theory is that society evolves because people’s relationship with nature tends to change more radically and rapidly than their relationships with each other. Technology outpaces law and custom. From this mismatch, upheavals ensue. Society either moves up to a new stage with more scope for the new technology, or the technology is crushed to fit the confines of the old society. As the technology falls back, so does the society, perhaps to an earlier configuration. In the mainstream of history, however, society has moved forward through a succession of stages, each of which is a stable configuration between the technology people have to work with and their characteristic ways of working together. But this stability contains the seeds of new instabilities. Proponents of this theory argue that the succession of booms and slumps, wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions, which began in August 1914 and which shows no prospect of an end, indicates that we live in just such an age of upheaval.
This theory is, of course, the Materialist Conception of History, formulated by the pioneering American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and (a little earlier) by the German philosopher Karl Heinrich Marx. These men looked with optimism to a future society and with stern criticism on the present. Property, wrote one of them, ‘has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property…. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society….’
Beam me up. But before stepping onto the transporter to Morgan’s ‘higher plane,’ it might be wise to check the specifications. One constraint on the possible arrangements of a future society was indicated by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. He argued that private property was essential to industrial civilization: without property, no exchange; no exchange, no prices; no prices, no way of telling whether any given project is worthwhile or a dead loss. Given that every attempt to abolish the market on