Although certainly the exception and not the rule, science fiction is sometimes viewed as little more than the American western set in space. It tends to stem from placing characters with an independent streak as pioneers or settlers in new frontiers. If you imagine this trope placed in the hands of a British professor of 19th century literature, you have a taste of Gradisil.

To be fair, Adam Roberts invokes and utilizes elements of Oresteia — a trilogy of Greek tragedies — as much as the American western. In fact, the book is told in a trilogy form like Oresteia and explores its themes of murder, revenge and justice in society. Yet the setting — private individual colonization of near earth orbit in the period from the 2050s through the first third of the 22nd century — is as far from Athens or the American west as you can get. There are no great debates or oratory in the Pnyx just as there is no saloon, school marm or even a sheriff.

The first part of Gradisil serves largely as prelude to the main tale. Klara Gyeroffy relates her story in the first person, explaining how various individuals, largely wealthy, used new "magnetohydrodynamic" aircraft to gain and put living quarters in the magnetosphere. Many of these people are extremely individualistic and, in fact, there is a strong libertarian streak throughout the book. Klara analogizes the Uplands, as the colonized area becomes known, to Yggdrasil, the world tree of Viking myth. Although the metaphor tends to be overused a bit, the waves of the magnetosphere the aircraft use to reach space are the branches of the tree and the individual homes are the leaves. While ostensibly the tale of the death of Klara's father and her efforts to seek revenge for it, it serves as the back story for her daughter, Gradisil, named in honor of the mythological tree.

The second and largest part of the book tells Gradisil's story but never in her voice. Rather it tends to alternate between a first person account by her husband, Paul, and a third person account of a U.S. military officer assigned to the Uplands. This is a near future in which the U.S. and the European Union are at odds. The U.S. battles Muslims in an alliance with near eastern countries. The U.S. is by far the strongest military power and is not afraid to use it. In terms of the western, the U.S. is the gunslinger that comes to the peaceful town of the Uplands. The second half of the 21st century is marked by a variety of wars, including an E.U.-U.S. war and, at the end of the century, a U.S. war against the Uplands. In the latter, Gradisil is the recognized, although unelected, president (or town mayor) of the Uplands. The run-up to, strategy, execution and resolution of that war — one in which courtrooms are as important as battlefields — are the heart of the book and its namesake.