The Human Front [Paperback]

As I alluded to above, "The Human Front" is Ken MacLeod's take on alternate history, but anyone who knows MacLeod knows it will be anything but conventional. Actually, it does start off conventionally enough: it's the early 1960's and World War III has been raging with varying degrees of ferocity since 1949. Joe Stalin is a romanticized guerrilla fighter in the model of Che, and the Soviet Union has been beaten down to the point where the allies have installed a government in Petrograd.

Macleod rather cleverly juxtaposes roles in this world; in addition to Stalin, JFK is reviled as a butcher ("Hey, Hey, JFK, how many kids have you killed today?"). By so doing, he obliterates the myths of the past, and rather shrewdly, points out that historical interpretation is largely a function of the circumstances in which one lives, or more simply, a result of how the past turned out. While he is no apologist for Stalin (by any stretch) he creates a plausible reality where he is revered as a pragmatic, dedicated revolutionary, rather than reviled as a butcher. Thus removed from our known context he can create an absurd inversion that nonetheless sheds light on how we view our own heroes.

However, instead of following this believable alternate reality to a logical conclusion, MacLeod throws a curveball in the main character, John Matheson's, enigmatic encounter with one of the U.S.'s strange disc shaped bombers. Although the next twenty pages of narrative are fairly conventional, MacLeod has set the stage, and everything thereafter is tainted by this puzzling mystery.

To go any further would spoil the plot, but suffice it to say that the novel takes numerous bizarre twists before arriving at a fascinating ending. Specifically, unlike most Alternate History, which revels in an outcome discrete from reality, MacLeod attempts to reconcile his world to our own in a manner reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle". The mechanism of this reconciliation is completely original without being outlandish, and the statement made is simple but profound. In essence, MacLeod is arguing that we are all victims of circumstance, that, generally speaking, shaping the world's destiny is beyond the individual. Thus, it is left to each of us to live as best we can, in the hopes that the cumulative result is something better than where we started. At the same time, unlike much Alternate History, (and particularly what one would expect from such a politically conscious writer) MacLeod isn't entirely displeased with the path history has taken, and actually seems to find it better than many of the alternatives.

MacLeod packs more into the seventy-five pages of "The Human Front" than most authors do in novels four times as long. He has blended so many genres, I've lost count, and it's almost unfair to categorize it as Alternate History, in spite of the fact that it won the Sidewise Award for best Short Form Alternate History in 2001. Rather, MacLeod created a true SF hybrid, that evokes the best of many different themes. At the same time, he has written a character driven novel that explores some interesting themes around meaning and purpose. Ultimately, this is a work of literature in which the content far surpasses what one might expect from the length.

Jake Mohlman