‘What if something that didn’t happen had happened differently?’ is the tricksy question at the heart of Scottish Trotskyist Ken Macleod’s 2001 sci-fi novella The Human Front, re-printed here alongside two short essays and an interview with the author.
Like the shark in Jaws, the non-event in question is not revealed immediately, but its consequences are on display from page one.
It is 1963, and our narrator John Matheson – then a young boy living on the Isle of Lewis – hears…