Cold war space opera done right
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| Cover Artist: Nick Wells |
Space opera, like epic fantasy, allows us to entirely transpose our experience into one functionally and practically distinct from the real world. In so doing we get the freedom to ask questions via metaphor, world building and fantastical elements about hard real-world issues. In the last couple of years we’ve seen space operas talk about AI, consciousness, the nature of work, meaning and purpose. We’ve seen them address fascism, resistance, representation, the complicity of capitalism with authoritarianism and unpack the nature of sexuality and gender.
Into this mix comes Allen Stroud’s Anti-State, a stand-alone novel in an Expanse-like setting in which Stroud has already written a whole shelf of entries. No real prior knowledge is needed to read this one although it does refer to events in other books and feature many of those characters in greater or lesser roles.
Stroud’s main character is disabled in the sense that she is missing limbs and that is presented as exactly what it is – factually and without fuss. It’s an interesting choice both in terms of representation and in how it’s handled by a character who spends much of the story in a low gravity environment. There’s technology to help solve her challenges, but they aren’t there to heal her or to ‘make her complete’. This approach is good to see, not simply for representative purposes but because there’s some interesting commentary around what it means to have a body in a low gravity environment vs. Earth standard gravity.
The story itself is in deep cold war territory with the overall structure owing as much to Smiley’s People as it does to spaceships flashing through the void to blow one another up. The most obvious comparison is with James S. A. Corey’s The Expanse series – set as both are within the solar system and concerned as they are with the politics of earth extending to the rest of the system. There’s no proto-molecule in this but it does share the same concern with being at least moderately faithful to proper physics. It’s hard science fiction as far as that ever goes and there’s plenty of text highlighting just how much space will kill you at every opportunity.
We have allusions to Martian politics, independence, rebellions and there are, lurking in the background, rogue billionaires with tech that can rival the militaries of space faring states.
This isn’t novel – this could be a story about submarines fighting it out in the North Atlantic without too much changing with the talking heads in London, Berlin and Washington instead of on spaceships and asteroids and lunar colonies.
That’s not necessarily bad – you know what you’re going to get, and it delivers on that competently without rocking the boat. It’s a somewhat nostalgic approach to space opera with strong golden age vibes intersecting with more modern concerns such as where it explores what it means to be human in the context of advanced technological systems.
What worked for me was the layered world, the sense that there were politics and people and stuff happening of which the events in this story are only a part. I like that feeling of being in a wider world. I liked the focus on space being deadly and low gravity being a thing that impacts every single aspect of a life lived within its grasp.
I also largely liked the overall story of secret plots unravelling, of people with torn loyalties discovering where they truly want to put their faith and, most of all, I liked the small scale of it. Sure, the stakes are high, adventuring in space will do that, but at the same time they concern a small group of people in a set of tin cans adrift in an ocean of nothing. They might travel millions of miles but they remain determinedly fixed in a locked room whose seals keep them alive as much as trap them.
The ideas here are small too – not all in a bad way. Stroud explores the little impacts of technology, distance and logistics that conventional space travel (i.e. without the fantasies of FTL or warp drives or anti-gravity) have on people. Loss of bone density, the lack of decent food, shortages of power, the challenge of changing direction when you’re travelling at thousands of kilometres an hour.
I’d like to have had some larger ideas here around what it means for human society to be out there and these are there a little, but are also largely subsumed within the context of a military hierarchy that gives the book the occasional feel of mil-SF (although without any of the fetishization of guns and violence).
The one place where the politics/world building doesn’t quite work for me is in this military context and hence the larger ideas also don’t quite connect. The reason for this is my own view that the idea that ‘governments have the best tech’ is not just outdated but permanently in the rear-view mirror. This is where the book’s Cold War vibe is least convincing, although most consistent because I think that’s the last time governments could reasonably be said to have tech not available to the general public.
These days it is entirely private companies developing that tech and selling it to our governments and it is almost entirely private companies exploring space. The question of how polities here on earth could extend their ‘national’ boundaries into space is just assumed rather than explored and the same for the corporate elements. The private companies in the novel are nefarious which isn’t hard to believe but they aren’t well realised which is a shame.
Still, Anti-State is a decently executed and complex political thriller set in space. Its tight scope delivers a compelling story despite its other flaws.
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The Math
Highlights:
- Spaceships
- Proper orbital mechanics
- Politics and plots
Nerd coefficient: 6/10, a layered political thriller as at home in space as it would be in the 1970s North Atlantic
Reference: Stroud, Allen, Anti-State [Flame Tree Press, 2026].
STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.
