The introduction to the American edition of *The Star Fraction* contains Ken MacLeod’s second-most famous dictum – “History is the trade secret of science fiction, and theories of history are its invisible engine.” The Fall Revolution books are all about history and people trying to make it (or perhaps more accurately, histories, and people trying to make them). They’re also books that reflect a very specific historical period – when the Berlin Wall had fallen or was about to fall but the Washington Consensus had yet to gel – a moment where the cold logic of nuclear deterrence still held, sort of, while the political transformation of Eastern Europe and the new market anarchism of Sachs, drugs and rock and roll was starting to get going. Maybe the closest thing to the manic intensity of the first three books (and chunks of the fourth) is the Zone of Thomas Pynchon’s *Gravity’s Rainbow* – black markets, hustlers, ideas, freewheeling politics, and the frozen arc of the Rocket still hanging above it all. They’re also (and much more so than Pynchon, whose zaniness is often forced) very *funny* books – they don’t play anything for obvious laughs, but are riddled through with intellectual black comedy.

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In 1898, the Skibbereen Eagle, the weekly paper of the landed and merchant classes of West Cork, published a thundering editorial against Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia. The Eagle had taken note of the Tsar’s tendency to trample the self-determinative rights of various Central Asian nations and took it upon itself to say to the world; ‘down with that sort of thing’. And so it was that the last of the Romanovs’ hand surely trembled as he clutched his own copy of the Eagle and timidly read its promise to “keep its eye on the Emperor of Russia and all such despotic enemies – whether at home or abroad – of human progression and man’s natural rights which undoubtedly include a nation’s right to self-government. ‘Truth’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Justice’ and the ‘Land for the People’ are the solid foundations on which the Eagle’s policy is based.”

And so it is, that a week after the Conservatives took power in Westminster and announced their insistence on ramming through their first round coalition negotiation document manifesto, the question of what it means for Ireland must be asked, and fulminating admonitions bellowed from across the Irish Sea. Or, in my case, south London. [click to continue…]