Probably, the worst sci-fi book I've ever read. Boring, and with a near future quite difficult to believe. The story makes no sense. I didn't feel anything for anyone of the characters but indiference. I force myself to finish it, but at the end I skipped the last couple of chapters, enough is enough.I bought this book following the recomendation of the late Iain Banks, whose books I really enjoyed. Obviously that recommendation was based on his friendship with Macleod and nothing else.I'm not g...

A jumble of leftist political ideas without anything too credible to hold them together.I found the story quite difficult to follow, and the relevance of what was happening at each moment was hard to estimate. It wasn't William Gibson difficult though: MacLeod is nowhere near as good a writer as Gibson. Rather, the writing was just confused and constantly interrupted by his attempts to insert flavour into it and the characters, and/or to make some political joke. But this didn't work for me – ev...

Clearing out my "currently reading" shelf of books that I abandoned. This one I started reading thinking it was a followup to a different book... but it wasn't. I got a good 50% of the way though it though. Not sure why, because nothing about it was exactly captivating. Something to do with unionising construction workers? Boring!

After a slow start to this book i couldnt imagine it would end being a smart political near future SF that became much better. It had compelling characters, interesting cyberpunk elements and political ideas,world that made you think. Surprisingly strong for a debut novel.

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.

I might be overdosing on Ken Macleod by this point in the summer but it's such a good feeling. And with The Star Fraction, you arrive at his first novel and the start of his Fall Revolution sequence. Set in a balkanized Britain of the mid-21st century, The Star Fraction tells the story of security mercenary Moh Kohn who along with scientist Janis Taine is fleeing the US/UN's technology cops. Jordan Brown is a teenage atheist in the Christian fundamentalist of Beulah City that wants out.Macleod's...

This was an incredibly dense read. Prepare to navigate your way through every variant of communism, capitalism, socialism, and most other -isms you can think of as you follow the characters through this book. If you do, though, it's certainly worth it.There's one big idea that I've never thought was sufficiently explored in any sci-fi novel I've read: specifically, the significance of memes as self-interested packets of information that seek to propagate themselves throughout human culture. Well...

I've been trying to read this for a couple of years, and this was my third and last attempt. The first problem the first time around was that it wasn't what I'd expected (having been recommended by Iain M. Banks I was expecting something more operatic). The second time through I just couldn't commit. This time around those first two problems held, and then my inability to engage with any characters (I made it halfway this time, so had more time to get to know them) killed it for me. There was no...

27 October 2007 - ****. This is the first novel in the Fall Revolution series, although it is not strictly a sequential series. The books are:#1 The Star Fraction (1995) - Prometheus Award winner 1996.#2 The Stone Canal (1996) - Prometheus Award winner 1998.#3 The Cassini Division (1998) – Nebula Award nominee 1999.#4 The Sky Road (1999) – British SF Award winner 1999.This was Ken MacLeod's first novel in 1995, and is the beginning of his Fall Revolution series. It also establishes the Earth set...

‘The Star Faction’ gave me a pleasant feeling of nostalgia, reminding me of all the cyberpunk that I read during my teenage years. Not surprising, as it was published in 1995. Although the focus on convoluted left wing politics gives it an original twist, there’s also a lot of this sort of very familiar business:"All right," he said. He stood and stretched and grinned at all of them. “I’m gonna need a terminal, my gun, the drug samples, some anti-som tabs, and half a pack of filter joints.” He l...

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 t...

Just one of my favourite books ever. Cracking UK-based future politico-punk, complete with left-libertarian communes and AI inception in a Balkanised Britain. Superb.

Storyline: 1/5Characters: 3/5Writing Style: 2/5World: 3/5This was one of those rare cases where it would have been better to have read an author interview before starting the book. I delight in creativity and surprises to the extent that I usually don't read synopses and always avoid reviews. There was a lot of creativity and some good surprises, but I spent most of the book in a fugue trying to figure out why any of it mattered.In many ways I should have connected with The Star Fraction. I like...

I did not like this book. I found it to be problematic in at least two ways:1) it replaced science fiction with techno-babble; and2) it latched onto one, extremely unlikely, world-view and just ran with it.First, I like science fiction; I do not like techno-babble, which is what parts of this book often became. I remember parts where the author talked about "genetic search algorithms" and other techno-babble type stuff just to throw such words around. Why not just say search? I found that extrem...

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 fig...

The Star Fraction is an extremely divisive novel. Partly by design and partly by subject matter. Any book that delves so deeply into the grit and grime of political and economic ideologies is going to be uncomfortable for some of its readers. With that as a given, MacLeod goes and shoots himself in the foot by avoiding picking a side in the end, leaving leftists unfulfilled and members of the right just horribly angry.If this review does happen to inspire you to read this, I highly encourage see...

I got about 25 percent thru the audiobook, then switched it off.Pros : Well written dialog and non-dialog. Pretty good world-building and human character development. There were some interesting SF ideas introduced but ...Cons: Way too much political discussion, mostly, centering on the feverish in-fighting among dozens of factions (communist, socialist, libertarians, anarchists and every combination of these). It got really tiring, really fast. There was a sprinkle of some interesting SF ideas,...

I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. I seek out genuinely "left" sci-fi and fantasy (Iain Banks, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, etc.) and this one was on China Mieville's list of "Fifty Fantasy & Sci-Fi Works that Socialists Should Read". But Star Fraction is much more political than believable. It reads in parts like the wet dream of a left-newspaper seller, with obscure Socialist splinter groups (the "Last International") occupying key positions in world history. There's little...

At times was closer to three stars, probably not objectively 4 but that's personal bias. Unfortunate that the two main female characters mostly feel like they're there to be romances, at least until the last quarter of the book when Janis gets her own plot. Additionally, while I love the full-immersion style of worldbuilding, full of tantalizing hints to things that aren't fully explained, you need explanations for world elements that are plot critical. Unfortunately, some of these come a bit to...

Norlonto had the smell of a port city, that openness to the world: the sense that you had only to step over a gap to be carried away to anywhere. (Perhaps the sea had been the original fifth-colour country, but it had been irretrievably stained with the bloody ink from all the others.) And it had also the feel that the world had come to it. In part this was illusory: most of the diversity around them had arrived much earlier than the airships and space platforms, yet her and there Kohn could pic...