The Star Fraction

Начало книги

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.

Читать дальше →