''The Human Front'' is a 2001 science fiction/ alternate-history novella by

Ken MacLeod Kenneth Macrae MacLeod (born 2 August 1954) is a Scottish science fiction writer. His novels ''The Sky Road'' and '' The Night Sessions'' won the BSFA Award. MacLeod's novels have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, Nebula, Locus ...

. It was reissued with added content (an afterword and an additional essay by MacLeod, along with an interview) by

PM Press PM Press is an independent publisher, founded in 2007 by a small collective of people, that specializes in radical literature. Previously based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the press relocated to Binghamton, New York, in 2022. Bookstores In ...

in 2013. The novel takes place in an alternate-history 1960s in which the Cold War has turned hot. After World War II the US conquered the Soviet Union, leaving China as the sole socialist power. However, by the 1960s Communist insurgents (including the main character) are fighting guerrilla wars in the UK and Western Europe. Flying saucers (fighting on the American side) add a science fictional element. MacLeod explains in the afterword that real-world Western

Maoism Maoism, officially Mao Zedong Thought, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed while trying to realize a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic o ...

was one inspiration for this premise: "The world that Matheson sees is a distorted reflection of the world that his equivalents in our world saw in imagination: one in which the Soviet Union no longer existed as a socialist state, and in which every struggle was part of the apocalyptic confrontation of U.S. imperialism and its allies versus the revolutionary peoples rallied behind the Chinese banner."''The Human Front''. PM Press, 2013. Page 81

References

{{reflist Novels by Ken MacLeod