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| (Cover Artist: Nick Wells) |
There's a review I wrote of Allen Stroud's novel Anti-State that is up today in the most recent edition of Strange Horizons. This book is a mid-to-far future space opera that functions as a standalone installment to the author's larger Fractal series of novels and novellas. The main plot details a political uprising that is triggered on a martian colony when workers from Earth attempt to overthrow a system of indentured labor. This story unfolds in parallel to a mystery surrounding a conspiracy that is uncovered by soldiers from Earth who have been tasked with investigating this uprising.
An excerpt from the start of my review is below:
Immediately after finishing Allen Stroud’s novel Anti-State, I struggled with the impression that there was something about this book that was incomplete. Stroud’s novel is marketed by its publisher as a standalone story set in the same universe as the author's ongoing Fractal series, which is itself an extensive collection of interconnected novels and novellas following humanity’s efforts to colonize the other planets of the solar system. Specifically, Anti-State follows the attempts by various political factions to contend with a worker uprising which breaks out on a corporate-run Martian colony in the twenty-second century, with this uprising in turn gradually revealed to have possibly fallen prey to the same corrupting forces that have given rise to the system of indentured labor which its members are seeking to dismantle.
While there were elements of Anti-State's story that I felt were intriguing, as I stated in the review, I had some pretty severe objections to the way that the novel eventually frames its themes. Throughout the story, Stroud sustains an overarching question pertaining to the nature of authoritarianism, and the viability of political anarchy as a social and moral system. The primary viewpoint characters of Anti-State are all shown to be people who harbor contrasting relationships to authority, with each of these perspectives initially poised to represent alternate examinations of the book's themes surrounding social justice. Yet as the story continued I started to feel that as fascinating as Stroud's handling of these subjects initially were, the novel neglected to examine them after they had been introduced. If anything, the eventual resolution of Anti-State's narrative came across as flat, with one character in particular meeting an end whose implications seemed to draw the story towards something potentially authoritarian.
One point that I didn't have time to get into in the review were some similarities I noticed between this novel, and the book Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Cory. Both stories represent vaguely realistic mid future space operas about humanity colonizing the solar system, and both novels also feature plots that in part concern a political rebellion that breaks out amongst the workers of a corporate-run space colony. It's even the case that both novels have plot lines whose central conflict is triggered in part by an off-screen attack that is carried out against a station located on Mars's moon, Phobos.
I didn't feel that any of these similarities were inherently derivative (at most I think they are just an indication of one author perhaps drawing inspiration from the work of others), but one thing that did stand out to me while reading Anti-State was the way in which both books seemed to be operating under contrasting moral paradigms. My eventual impression of Anti-State was that this was a novel about the importance of following symbols of authority, with the protagonists of Stroud's book being individuals who are highlighted as virtuous because they have pledged themselves to serve the interests of an organization that is external to themselves. By contrast the general arc of Leviathan Wakes was one that highlighted how the book's protagonists come to recognize a mutual responsibility which they all harbor to one another as human beings, with the point of that narrative being the way in which this responsibility transcends national and ideological obligations.
Both Anti-State and Leviathan Wakes addressed similar social questions, but eventually seemed to reach wildly different conclusions regarding their subjects.
The review of Anti-State which I wrote for Strange Horizons can be read at this link.