Macleod’s Star Fraction is still unsurpassed for me in political scifi. It’s the kind of novel that can only be written by someone born in Europe, with the lived experience of wars being reflections of reflections of reflections of old conflicts, warped and folded and turned inside out. It’s a wild read.
Reading Macleod's Fall Revolution books as a teen 20-ish years ago blew my fucking mind. I had barely half a clue about the historical and political references he was building on (and making what I assume were very clever wry jokes about) but it took me somewhere else--somewhere else entirely. Somewhere very different from the chrome-plated Jonathan Swift kind of stuff I'd got my hands on before then (modulo some outliers like Monica Hughes, who tended to be more "abandon technology, return to monke").
The first Ken Macleod book I bought circa 1998 was The Cassini Division, solely because it had a shiny embossed cover of a robot shooting lasers, which of course had no relation to the book's contents.
