Review: Anti-State, by Allen Stroud

SYNOPSIS

A standalone story set in The Fractal universe, which began with the much lauded Fearless.

2121 AD. Three years after the first Mars conflict, the colony is still struggling to recover. Corporations fight to hold on to their investments. Old secrets resurface and new faces appear.

Magnus Sirocco should never have been allowed to come here. He is a vigilante turned revolutionary who has been given a cause. He doesn’t lose. Ever. Peter Iskander leads a new religious mission to deliver the promised land to their people. And after being investigated, exonerated and promoted, Commodore Ellisa Shann returns, but when a ship is stolen, she is drawn into another deadly duel.

My Review

Thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for organising this tour, to Nick and the team at Flame Tree for my copy of this book, and to the BFS member who told me that the book was launched at Eastercon, which reminded me to email Anne about when the review copies were sent out. They weren’t sent until after Eastercon. I’ve had to do some speed reading. Also, Nick and Allen, if you’re reading this, I’m petitioning for the Fractal episodes to be published as a collection. Go onnn, you know you want to. Also, hopefully see you all at Fantasycon in October, finances permitting.

Full disclosure, I haven’t completely finished reading the book yet. I over-exerted myself for too many days in a row and have spent Tuesday and Wednesday in an inertial stew. However, I have made progress and I should have the book finished by this evening. So I’m writing this review based on what I’ve read so far and will update it when I’ve finished.

When I have had the wherewithal to read, I haven’t been able to put this book down, and I resented the interruptions (like having to go to a medical appointment on Monday) and I resent my brain for not letting me go back to reading once I’ve been interrupted.

An ex-soldier is offered a job on Mars, to keep him out of trouble, after having beaten up a mafioso in Italy. A monk on Mars has a mission, and it isn’t just to hand out food in the cafeteria. And Ellisa Shan is back in space and finds she has an unexpected job to do.

Stroud knows how to start a story with a strong action scene and an interesting character. I’ve read some of the Fractal episodes and two of the novels, he has a pattern. It really draws the reader into the story, hooking you from the start. The Fractal books are pretty hard sci-fi, reasonable, logical extensions of what we can already do or would expect from the technology we have or hope to develop, with adventure and action thrown in, and Anti-State sits perfectly in the same setting.

The return of characters from the main series and new characters, makes use of the background the reader already has if you’ve read the other books, while bringing new perspectives into the story world. It also works well if you’ve never read the books or Episodes, as an introduction to the setting and Stroud’s writing style. You can pick it up as a complete stand-alone and get the information, and then hopefully a reader would want to go back to the beginning and read about why Ellisa Shan needed to be cleared and what was happening in the solar system that influenced to Mara Revolution.

An enjoyable sci-fi that has interesting complex characters and explores important themes of corporate control and exploitation. And now I’m going back to reading it.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Allen Stroud is an award-winning writer of science fiction and fantasy. He has work published as novels, short stories and in computer games, having worked on Elite Dangerous, Phoenix Point and Baldur’s Gate 3. His first novel with Flame Tree Press, Fearless was praised as “Hard SF”,
describing a vivid future for humanity as we colonise the solar system. This is the start of the Fractal series, with three novels and six Fractal episodes published so far.

Stroud is a researcher at Coventry University with the Centre of Peace and Security. He specializes in Narrative, Applied Science Fiction and Futures research. He has also written non-fiction and is the author of The Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (2023) and The Historical Dictionary of
Science Fiction Literature (to be published in 2026) by Bloomsbury.

Stroud works on computer games, roleplaying games and also composes music for audio dramas.

He was the chair of FantasyCon in 2017, 2018, 2021 and 2023, the annual convention of the British Fantasy Society.

allenstroud.com / X: @AllenJStroud

---

FLAME TREE MYTH & FICTION

Dedicated to excellent original writing in horror, science fiction and fantasy. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.

Learn more at http://www.flametreepress.com and connect on social media @FlameTreePress.

Awarded independent publisher of 2024 and 2025 by the British Fantasy Society.