Ken MacLeod's novella The Human Front appears in print again, this time as a slim paperback from new imprint PM Press. The volume is part of its “outspoken authors” series, which includes writers like Nalo Hopkinsone and Cory Doctorow. In addition to the novella, the PM Press edition reprints a brief note about the background for The Human Front, an interview with MacLeod by Terry Bisson, and a lengthy bibliography. Previously published as a chapbook by PS Publishing and then collected in both a “Best Of” anthology and in the NESFA Press volume of MacLeod's shorter works, Giant Lizards from Outer Space, The Human Front bears both a catchy title and a strongly SF theme: alien invasion.

MacLeod writes with a refreshing sense of humor, a strong dash of science. MacLeod is equally skilled at focusing on the particular and applying the wide brush of SF sense of wonder. It opens with the young narrator hearing about the death of Josef Stalin via wireless. We know we're in an alternate history from the very first sentence (which also alludes to a famous death, though in our world this happened on November 22, 1963): “Like most people of my generation, I remember where I was on March 17, 1963, the day Stalin died.”

Young John Matheson, then about eight years old, lives with his family in Aird, a remote and bleak Scottish isle. His father, a doctor, takes John with him on his rounds, and also on visits to a nearby NATO base to buy goods at the local store. Some time after Stalin's death—shot by American soldiers as they hunted Stalin and his partisans—John and his father are at the base when an incident occurs. They witness the crash landing of a strange bomber. As the ground crew haul the wounded pilot from the bomber, John's father shoulders his way through the crowd with the words that he is a doctor. Immediately, men in black cordon off the area, and interview all the witnesses. John is pulled back while his father treats the pilot. When his father returns, shaken, he forbids John to mention the incident to anyone. Yet young John has seen something about the pilot he cannot forget, how small he was, and the grayish color of his skin.

As John grows up, they move to a larger Scottish city, Greenock, an industrial city on the Forth of Clyde, sooty and grimy, with sharp class divisions. Here John falls in with communist sympathizers, who begin to wage campaigns against Americans stationed in the area. His father scoffs at the naiveté, yet rather than argue with John gently suggests he look into the plane that crashed those years ago, and keep his eyes open rather than blindly accept what people tell him.

John remains with the communists, who begin an open guerrilla campaign once enough of their cadre have military training from their national service. He and his small team plan to bomb a railroad bridge, but instead end up in the middle of a massive battle, where they capture another pilot, this time a seven-foot blond woman, who blithely mentions that she is from Venus, and the gray pilots from Mars. Before they can extract themselves from the battle, they are zapped, and awaken aboard a vast ship, which drops them off in a prisoner of war camp. While told they are on Venus, they plot their escape, in the course of which they learn the real truth behind the Martians and Venusians.

The Human Front manages to throw out one surprise after another. Suckered in by the first sentence, one might think this simply an alternate history, and indeed MacLeod talks at length about the roots of his alternate history take in one of the essays that accompanies the novella. Yet new elements continually appear to come to light about the story, and the reader almost must run to keep up. The political aspects are not one-sided. Even though the protagonist fights on the side of the communists, some of the other communists come across as nasty and equally willing to kill other communisys (Trotskyists, for one) as Americans and Brits. There's a sense of immediacy and verité in MacLeod's narration; the Scottish setting and some of the political background seems very much taken from biographical material.