Disclaimer: I only managed to read half of this book before giving up.
Star Fractions is set in a near future Balkanized United Kingdom broken up into multiple small anarchic and/or dystopian states each based around different political or religious doctrines, resulting largely from US/UN policies of divide and conquer. And something strange is emerging in the net, something the US/UN overlords are not happy about.
This was MacLeod’s first book and he dived straight into the then popular sub-genre of cyberpunk which, in itself, is fine but, and I’m aware that this is always a danger with his work and probably more so in his early work, the cyber punk aspects are, for me, completely drowned in his left biased politics. I’m not against MacLeod’s politics in themselves, in fact I probably lean that way myself, but it’s just that I’m not sure if this book knows whether it’s trying to be cyberpunk science fiction or political manifesto, and in the end that became just too much for me; much of the political vocabulary and subtleties just shot straight over my head.
I possibly could have lived with and skimmed all the political preaching, though there was an awful lot of it, but in the end the whole thing became too much effort. Star Fraction was published in ’95 and, as is so common with near future cyberpunk novels written around then, its incorrect predictions are now, in retrospect, so glaringly obvious as to be painful. I found large amounts of the technology to be embarrassingly out of date (modems and printing out news from the net for reading) especially when sat next to other technology that was equally embarrassingly too optimistic all compounded by politics that felt just as out of date as the tech. And this all made the whole set up painfully implausible. Sad, because the story was shaping up to be at least moderately good; it was just too much effort wading through all that baggage to get at it and I put the book down at around the halfway mark.
2/5 stars
Star Fractions is set in a near future Balkanized United Kingdom broken up into multiple small anarchic and/or dystopian states each based around different political or religious doctrines, resulting largely from US/UN policies of divide and conquer. And something strange is emerging in the net, something the US/UN overlords are not happy about.
This was MacLeod’s first book and he dived straight into the then popular sub-genre of cyberpunk which, in itself, is fine but, and I’m aware that this is always a danger with his work and probably more so in his early work, the cyber punk aspects are, for me, completely drowned in his left biased politics. I’m not against MacLeod’s politics in themselves, in fact I probably lean that way myself, but it’s just that I’m not sure if this book knows whether it’s trying to be cyberpunk science fiction or political manifesto, and in the end that became just too much for me; much of the political vocabulary and subtleties just shot straight over my head.
I possibly could have lived with and skimmed all the political preaching, though there was an awful lot of it, but in the end the whole thing became too much effort. Star Fraction was published in ’95 and, as is so common with near future cyberpunk novels written around then, its incorrect predictions are now, in retrospect, so glaringly obvious as to be painful. I found large amounts of the technology to be embarrassingly out of date (modems and printing out news from the net for reading) especially when sat next to other technology that was equally embarrassingly too optimistic all compounded by politics that felt just as out of date as the tech. And this all made the whole set up painfully implausible. Sad, because the story was shaping up to be at least moderately good; it was just too much effort wading through all that baggage to get at it and I put the book down at around the halfway mark.
2/5 stars
