Super-State: A Novel of a Future Europe

Super-State is the Brian Aldiss novel that few people read and that I keep finding myself thinking about. It is set in a near-future Europe that has unified into a single political super-state, and the book follows a wide cast of characters across the continent in a kind of mosaic novel structure: a couple arguing about marriage, a German philosopher, an English engineer working on a Mars project, an immigrant family in Italy, others.

The plot is barely a plot. The book is a portrait, in the mode of late-period Aldiss, of what a future Europe might feel like from inside if the European project actually succeeded. The Mars subplot ties some of it together. The marriage subplot ties more of it together than the cover suggests.

Three stars. Not for every reader. For the right reader, this is a fascinating late-Aldiss artifact and a serious piece of political SF that came out a few years too early to get the attention it deserved.