The Star Fraction

Ken MacLeod was a lifelong friend of Iain Banks, and their interest in science fiction was parallel, though MacLeod's interest in Trotskyist politics gave his work a harder political edge than Banks's. This is most evident in his first four books, collectively known as the Fall Revolution, in which each volume explores different aspects of far left political ideology. The first novel, The Star Fraction, opens in a near-future Balkanised Britain, with a mercenary, a teenager and a scientist finding themselves working together for a revolution against the more or less benign dictatorship that rules the world. By the end of the novel, however, the financial software that has been used to shape the revolution is found to be an artificial intelligence. The next volume, The Stone Canal, takes the story out into space, and by the third volume, The Cassini Division, humans are at war with uploaded beings around Jupiter. Then, in the fourth book, The Sky Road, the sequence makes an abrupt change of direction when it is revealed that a different decision made by one of the characters in the middle of the second novel has created a parallel universe leading to a catastrophic outcome. Why it's on the list: The various volumes of the Fall Revolution Quartet have, between then, won two Prometheus Awards and a BSFA Award. The Quartet marked a dramatic debut for someone who has gone on to become one of the most successful of contemporary science fiction writers, and the political underpinning of most of his fiction has created a very distinctive body of work.