Adam
Roberts’ debut novel Salt was a story
that balanced the meat and potatoes of conceptual science fiction with a
political examination of the crossroads between anarchy and
authoritarianism. Later, his eleventh
novel (excluding the parodies) New Model Army was the pertinent contrast of a purely democratic militia against a
traditional army (an organization that historically has been, and is currently,
totalitarianist). Fitting nicely in the
middle of these two is Roberts’ sixth novel Gradisil
(2007). An intriguing exploration of
libertarianism, Roberts unpacks the political ideology with his trademark
attention to society and the individual, telling the saga of one family’s rise
into the highest ‘uplands’ of Earth possible and the turmoil that results.
Gradisil is at heart the story of three generations of
one family—an atypical family, but a realistic one for it. The novel opens with teenage Klara as she
helps her father set up home in high orbit around Earth. Wanting to escape the political trouble
brewing between the European Union and the US, the pair are among the first
people to fly into the upper atmosphere carrying a large metal tube and filling
it with needed supplies: oxygen tanks, communications gear, food, sleeping
hammocks, and the like—a truly Spartan freedom, but true freedom,
nonetheless. A tragedy interrupting
their zero-g set up, Klara is left to pick up the pieces of life as war breaks
out below. Giving birth to a daughter,
Gradisil, the narrative shifts ahead in time to when the Uplands, as the
orbiting domiciles are called, have come to represent a political objective to
the American government. The homes numbering in the thousands, most of which
populated by rich dissidents, the President and his cabinet want to establish American
governance and tax the burgeoning populace.
With violence between the land and sky threatening, Gradisil attempts to
unite the Uplanders in defense of their “motherland”. After experiencing catastrophes of her own,
it is up Gradisil’s timid son Hope to resolve the political issues that have
built around the Uplands, Earth’s most wide open frontier.
