The Human Front
Authors: Ken MacLeod
Winner of the
Prometheus Award
BSFA Award
Sidewise Award
“
The Human Front
has pretty much everything you could ask from a great story: character, insight, plot, that quality of description that transports a feeling, sensation, incident or landscape seemingly direct from world to mind, and revelation. It has substance. It should make your mind reel, and work.”
—Iain M. Banks
“As much fun as [Macleod’s] books provide, it’s that fierceness, that seriousness of purpose, that powers their engines and makes me want to read on.”
—Locus
“
The Human Front
is a complete knock out … elegant, eloquent and laugh-out-loud funny. And that last quality by itself makes it worth the very weird trip.”
—Rick Kleffel,
The Agony Column
“Ken MacLeod brings dramatic life to some of the core issues of technology and humanity.”
—Vernor Vinge
1.
The Left Left Behind
Terry Bisson
2.
The Lucky Strike
Kim Stanley Robinson
3.
The Underbelly
Gary Phillips
4.
Mammoths of the Great Plains
Eleanor Arnason
5.
Modem Times 2.0
Michael Moorcock
6.
The Wild Girls
Ursula Le Guin
7.
Surfing the Gnarl
Rudy Rucker
8.
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow
Cory Doctorow
9.
Report from Planet Midnight
Nalo Hopkinson
10.
The Human Front
Ken MacLeod
11.
New Taboos
John Shirley
12.
The Science of Herself
Karen Joy Fowler
Ken MacLeod © 2013
This edition © 2013 PM Press
“The Future Will Happen Here, Too” was first published November 2010 in
The Bottle Imp,
the e-zine of the Scottish Writing Exhibition, published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
The Human Front
was first published as a chapbook in 2001 by PS.
Series editor: Terry Bisson
ISBN: 978-1-60486-395-6
LCCN: 2012913630
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
Printed in the USA on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter Michigan
Outsides: John Yates/
Stealworks.com
Insides: Jonathan Rowland
Author photograph by Julie Howden ©
The Herald
“Other Deviations:
The Human Front
Exposed”
“The Future Will Happen Here, Too”
“Working the Wet End” Outspoken Interview with Ken MacLeod
L
IKE MOST PEOPLE OF
my generation, I remember exactly where I was on March 17, 1963, the day Stalin died. I was in the waiting-room of my father’s surgery, taking advantage of the absence of waiting patients to explore the nicotine-yellowed stacks of
Reader’s Digests
and
National Geographics,
and to play in a desultory fashion with the gnawed plastic soldiers, broken tin tanks, legless dolls and so forth that formed a disconsolate heap, like an atrocity diorama, in one corner. My father must have been likewise taking advantage of a slack hour towards the end of the day to listen to the wireless. He opened the door so forcefully that I looked up, guiltily, though on this particular occasion I had nothing to be guilty about. His expression alarmed me further, until I realised that the mixed feelings that struggled for control of his features were not directed at me.
Except one. It was with, I now think, a full awareness of the historic significance of the moment, as well as a certain sense of loss, that he told me the news. His voice cracked slightly, in a way I had not heard before.
”The Americans,” he said, “have just announced that Stalin has been shot.”
“Up against a wall?” I asked, eagerly.
My father frowned at my levity and lit a cigarette.
“No,” he said. “Some American soldiers surrounded his headquarters in the Caucasus mountains. After the partisans were almost wiped out they surrendered, but then Stalin made a run for it and the American soldiers shot him in the back.”
I almost giggled. Things like this happened in history books and adventure stories, not in real life.
“Does that mean the war is over?” I asked.
“That’s a good question, John.” He looked at me with a sort of speculative respect. “The Communists will be disheartened by Stalin’s death, but they’ll go on fighting, I’m afraid.”
At that moment there was a knock on the waiting-room door, and my father shooed me out while welcoming his patient in. The afternoon was clear and cold. I mucked about at the back of the house and then climbed up the hill behind it, sat on a boulder and watched the sky. A pair of eagles circled their eyrie on the higher hill opposite, but I didn’t let that distract me. After a while my patience was rewarded by the thrilling sight of a V-formation of American bombers high above, flying east. Their circular shapes glinted silver when the sunlight caught them, and shadowed black against the blue.
The newspapers always arrived on Lewis the day after they were printed, so two days passed before the big black headline of the
Daily Express
blared STALIN SHOT, and I could read, without fully comprehending, the rejoicing of Beaverbrook, the grave commentary of Cameron, the reminiscent remarks of Churchill, and frown over Burchett’s curiously disheartening reports from the front, and smile over the savage raillery of Cummings’s cartoon of Stalin in hell, shaking hands with Satan while hiding a knife behind his back.
Obituaries traced his life: from the Tiflis seminary, through the railway yards and oilfields of Baku, the bandit years as Koba, the October Revolution and the Five Year plans, the Purges and the Second World War; his chance absence from the Kremlin during the atomic bombing of Moscow in Operation Dropshot, and his return in old age to the ways and vigour of his youth as a guerrilla leader, rallying Russia’s remaining Reds to the protracted war against the Petrograd government; to the contested, gruesome details of his death and the final, bloody touch, the fingerprint identification of his hacked-off hands.
By then I had already had a small aftershock of the revolutionary’s death myself, at school on the 18th. Hugh Macdonald, a pugnacious boy of nine or so but still in my class, came up to me in the playground and said: “I bet you’re pleased,
mac a dochter”
“Pleased about what?”
“About the Yanks killing Stalin, you cac.”
“And why should I not be? He was just a murderer.”
“He killed Germans.”
Hugh looked at me to see if this produced the expected change of mind, and when it didn’t he thumped me. I kicked his shin and he ran off bawling, and I got the belt for fighting.
That evening I played about with the dial of my father’s wireless, and heard through a howl of atmospherics a man with a posh Sassenach accent reading out eulogies on what the Reds still called Radio Moscow.
The genius and will of Stalin, great architect of the rising world of free humanity, will live forever.
I had no idea what it meant, or how anyone even remotely sane could possibly say it, but it remained in my mind, part of the same puzzle as that unexpected punch.
My father, Dr. Malcolm Donald Matheson, was a native of the bleak long island. His parents were crofters who had worked hard and scraped by to support him in his medical studies at Glasgow in the 1930s. He had only just graduated when the Second World War broke out. He volunteered for combat duty and was immediately assigned to the Royal Army Medical Corps. Of his war service, mainly in the Far East, he said very little in my hearing. It may have been some wish to pay back something to the community which had supported him which led him to take up his far from lucrative practice in the western parish of Uig, but of sentiment towards that community he had none. He insisted on being addressed by the English form of his name, instead of as “Calum” and I and my siblings were likewise identified: John, James, Margaret,
Mary, Alexander—any careless references to Iain, Hamish, Mairead, Mairi or Alasdair met a frown or a mild rebuke. Though a fluent native speaker of Gaelic, he spoke the language only when no other communication was possible—there were, in those days, a number of elderly monoglots, and a much larger number of people who never used the English language for any purpose other than the telling of deliberate lies. There are two explanations, one fanciful and the other realistic, for the latter phenomenon. The fanciful one is that they believed that the Gaelic was the language of heaven (was the Bible not written in it?) and that the Almighty did not hear, or did not understand, the English; or, at the very least, that a lie not told in Gaelic didn’t count. The realistic one is that English was the language of the state, and lying in its hearing was indeed legitimate, since the Gaels had heard so many lies from it, all in English.