Every now and then, a novel appears that blows away even the most jaded of readers. A novel, rather than consumed and forgotten, that burns itself in your memory, jolts you out of your easy chair, and widens your mind, drunk on the wine of words and ideas.

The Star Fraction is such a novel.

This novel is superbly styled, richly imagined, and layered with the ore of libertarian ideas.

The protagonist, Moh Kohn, is a gun for hire. He is not an assassin, but part of private security force, one of many such competing agencies that have arisen in a world half a century into the future, a world fighting back from the ashes of war. This professional alone is enough to pique the interest of any reader. Even more interesting is the fact the Kohn is a socialist, quite comfortable with his free market profession, where he satisfies an economic demand: protection.

The people that tend to hire Kohn's kind are socialists, besieged by Greens and eco-terrorists. During one such operation, Kohn is exposed to a memory enhancing drug developed by Janis Taine. The drug awakens long-forgotten memories of when Kohn's father wrote complex computer programs, among which were AI development.

These memories trigger an AI construct in the world net, and Kohn immediately becomes the target, along with Taine, of statist forces who want to shut down any potential AI that might run rampant through their systems. They seek hiding and protection in Norlonto, an anarchocapitalist enclave in northern London, where Kohn's operations are based and where free market principles rule.

Spinning into this whirlpool of events are several brilliantly drawn characters, such as young stock market genius/hacker Jordan Brown. Jordan, a resident of a strongly religious enclave, is a radical individualist, who develops his ideas despite the propaganda of his mini-society. After a transaction where he encounters ‘something’ in cyberspace he flees into Norlonto, and into direct contact with Kohn and the cybermind Kohn's memories awoke. Libertarian individualists may well identify more with Jordan than Kohn, but the differences are marginal.

The rich cast of characters includes a pair of unsavory Stasis heavies, members of the UN/US controlling world-force. This control is nominal, but expanding, and there is a sense of defeat in the novel. Such defeat is almost standard in libertarian sf, that liberty on Earth is doomed, and the only hope lies in the great beyond: space.

If I have problems with The Star Fraction it lies in MacLeod's sense of time. Although set fifty years hence, the novel fails to fully consider the phenomenal rate of change in language and technology. Common computer culture terms such as email, gopher, fetch, killfiles, and VR seem anachronistic. Fifty years ago, phone numbers were tied into street addresses, such as Madrone 1242. It is dubious that the electronic world half a century into the future still uses domain names and email identical to our use today, complete with the @ sign.

Of course, in the novel, fetch and gopher are virtual entities, not computer programs or protocols, and the whole terminology is one sf fans understand and identify as part of their current realities. They help us make sense of that future world in ways invented words cannot. Nonetheless the use of 1990s nomenclature, not that of the 2040s, seems out of place.

One of the qualities of libertarian sf is how to deal with libertarian realities. How does a libertarian world function, as if it were as real to its inhabitants as our current world is to us? The only examples it seems that we have are theoretical ones; it is not enough to preach revolution, for we must all live with the results and consequences. While no one can know how such a world will shape out, there have been various attempts, such as F. Paul Wilson's Tolive, J. Neil Schulman's agorist mini-society in Alongside Night, L. Neil Smith's American Confederacy novels, and others. Each gives unique insights into libertarian worlds.

Ken MacLeod's novel can now be added to this pantheon of fictional libertarian worlds. Norlonto sounds like a unique anarcho-capitalist ground, defended by socialists and individualists alike for its free-market qualities. Moh Kohn, The Star Fraction's socialist hero, argues that if socialism is better than capitalism, then it can damn well compete on even grounds, in the free market of ideas.

MacLeod's genius lies not only in imagining Norlonto, and writing a brilliantly styled novel, but in the fact that a socialist holds these libertarian ideas. In a libertarian ‘utopia,’ there are no clones. We all are different, and should be free to express our beliefs. The basic idea of a non-aggression principle holds for libertarian individualists and communitarians. In The Star Fraction the difference is that the socialists protect this principle with guns and the absolute right to self defense.

Sadly, there's of yet no American edition of The Star Fraction. No such edition appears planned either, though not from lack of trying from MacLeod and his publisher. No American publishing companies so far have picked up the novel.

The Star Fraction is due in paperback in September of this year, the same month that MacLeod's second novel, The Stone Canal, is published in hardcover.