Book Review: The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern

On freeing the human spirit from a late-stage-capitalist cell

My first experience with the work of Sim Kern (they/them) was with their nonfiction book Genocide Bad. Kern is Jewish and nonbinary, lives in Houston, and is active in Jewish Voice for Peace (a group of Jewish people who oppose Israeli state policies towards Palestinians). That book is a reckoning for them, as a member of an oppressed group which shares an ethnicity with a state that is actively engaging in genocide. They work through a whole raft of thorny issues, with great empathy for all involved, and I finished Genocide Bad with a sense of admiration for them. Sim Kern is a moral human being in a world where the human capacity for reason is used in a motivated manner in the service of the worst parts of our nature, and that is hard and brave to be.

It is with that sense of awe and admiration that I turn to their 2023 novel The Free People’s Village. This novel is several things at once: alternate history, political fiction, a deep character study, an exploration of trauma, and an exhortation to hope. And, deep below all of those things that nerds on the internet could write blog posts about, it is a moral book by a moral person.

The alternate history here is built into the background, not advertised, and I didn’t know this book counted as alternate history until I was well invested in the story. The story has a politically salient point of divergence that feels calculated to cause good trouble: this is a world where Al Gore wins Florida in the 2000 election, and from there the presidency. A liberal may think that this would have been the turning point of all America’s ills; not so, writes Kern, for this world is still miserably dystopian albeit technologically advanced. This is an America that has made Gore’s war against global warming a national priority. This takes the form of climate credits that restrict the ability of poor Americans to buy the occasional nice thing while rich people game it, a ready-made excuse to bulldoze Black neighborhoods for not being “eco-friendly” enough, and a shiny new justification for invading Brazil. This America has flying drones with sonic weapons, as well as dog-like drones along the lines of those made by Boston Dynamics. Both of these terrifying weapons are at the disposal of the Houston police department, the city where the novel is set.

Your protagonist is Maddie Ryan, a young white woman, a teacher, who ends up living in a dilapidated apartment building in a poor Black part of Houston because she is infatuated with the man who is its landlord, who wants to turn the building into an anarcho-communist commune. This building rapidly becomes a haven for artists and political activists, and Maddie joins a band that holds regular concerts there. The whole thing is bohemian/utopian while being relatively politically unaware, until the fateful day the City of Houston informs them that the building is being seized to build a monorail line. Maddie, and everyone she knows in the Lab, as they call it, find themselves in alliance with the local Black community, as well as radicals from all over Houston. The Lab becomes an encampment, like Occupy Wall Street but bigger, a symbol to America and to the world that another way of living is possible.

There is something very salient about the fact this story is set not in New York or California or Illinois, but in Texas. These grotty near-future SF stories are usually set in the more famous cities, which incidentally are in Democratic states, states which like to think of themselves as being somewhat insulated from the worst of late-stage capitalism. In Texas, the velvet glove of liberal democracy has been removed from the iron fist. The Texas of our world is a bastion of contemporary American fascism whose authoritarian peculiarities are being exported (the Texas Department of Education has a massive influence on the nation’s textbooks, for one example). In the novel this is all topsy-turvy, with Republicans lukewarmly following Democrats in their War on Climate Change, and much like the other party, are weaponizing it to persecute America’s weakest. On the one hand, this is a rebuke to liberals who think that everything can be solved via institutions, and on the other hand, reminds us that there are plenty of good people, active people, in red states. It is Houston that is the epicenter of a quake that shakes the world.

As so many of Kern’s characters are from minorities, queer or ethnic or in a great many cases both, they have been shackled by the trauma of American bigotry. That’s a theme that runs through this novel, where they are abused by the people that allegedly love them, as well as by a society that allegedly cares for them. The novel brings interpersonal abuse and societal oppression into parallel, and then demonstrates how hard they are to disentangle from one another. For example, Maddie is from a fundamentalist Christian background and rushed into marriage with an abusive man, before divorcing him and winding up with Fish, the aforementioned landlord. But Fish is not blameless, either, nor is he entirely untraumatized. Another such example is a Black character who is under house arrest and is monitored by an implant in his skin, blurring the line, again, between the societal and the domestic.

It’s telling that this novel has plenty of hope, but none of it comes from institutions. There’s very little about what constitutes “legitimate” resistance, or which organizations are truly worthy of your support, and more on what bluntly works. There’s civil disobedience in this novel, and there’s direct action, and both are implicitly stated to be worthy of support if they get the state to back off. On the other hand, the institutions of both local and national government are all basically oppressive forces that only ever make the lives of the Lab’s dwellers worse. Much is made about how Democrats are just as complicit in the national order as Republicans, and there is an argument over this timeline’s 2024 presidential election that will sound familiar to those of us who paid attention to discourse over the one in our own world. When contextualized with Kern’s own discussion of their worldview in Genocide Bad, I feel comfortable describing the philosophy of this novel as anarchist. It is a philosophy where only the people will save themselves, which brings to mind this verse from Charles Hope Kerr’s rendition of The Internationale:

We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgement hall
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all.
To make the thief disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell
We must ourselves decide our duty
We must decide and do it well.

Kern is not afraid to show the flaws of their characters, as socially disadvantaged as they are. You get an unflinching depiction of poverty, with the addictions and the compromises that it entails. Some people die, and die because of these compromises, but they are never abstracted into statistics. Each act of hurt is an indictment of the systems that made them possible, each moment of suffering another intrusion. Many of these characters are viewed from Maddie’s first-person perspective, as previously stated a white woman, which in theory sounds potentially unpleasant, but Kern is more skillful than that. Maddie is called to account several times, and she has to reckon with her privilege and her ignorance about the lives of those who lack it. Through Maddie you see how a privileged person can become a true ally of the oppressed, and that will be a useful demonstration for a lot of people.

There is a part of me, as I read this book, that wished I were there in the Lab, helping build utopia. Kern depicts a new society being born in great detail—not the detail of dreary transcripts of debates and rules and resource allocations, but rather in the way people act, people behave, people live. It reminded me of a version of the Occupy Wall Street movement as depicted in David Graeber’s The Democracy Project, but rougher around the edges. A whole little society was built there, based on better moral principles than our own. There are big personalities, of course, and people who have not really reckoned with the facts of their privilege, and act in that ignorant way. It’s not perfect, but it feels real, like something that could actually happen if enough of us could just snap out of it, and that is ultimately its glory.

The ending of this novel is not happy, exactly, but nor is it sad, exactly. The grand experiment of the novel ends, as we suspected and indeed dreaded it might, but such grand experiments achieve their grandeur by the fact they inspire further experiments. The denouement feels, again, like something real, plausible, almost inevitable. But even so, this novel inspired a certain swelling in my heart, an uplifting of my soul, that saw that better things are possible. As Cory Doctorow said in Walkaway (a novel with many thematic overlaps with this one, and one that fans of Kern’s may enjoy), “it’s not the fight you win, but the fight you fight.” This novel is, ultimately, honest about the stakes at play when dealing with utopia, about the fact that the fight will continue to be fought long past the point we may hope it is over, but it’s worth fighting anyway, because it’s just. But still, I dream of what people could do, if we woke up like the characters in Kern’s novel.

Reference: Kern, Sim. The Free People's Village [Levine Querido, 2024]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Looking Back at War Front: Turning Point

What if World War II happened ... this way?

There is a lot to be said about War Front: Turning Point, as I have discovered it after marching through its twenty-two missions. It is a real-time strategy game from 2007, made by the Hungarian studio Digital Reality. Its premise is a knockoff of Command and Conquer: Red Alert and its gameplay is ultimately a knockoff of Command and Conquer: Generals; I kept thinking about the latter during those missions as Generals was my first RTS and as such it has a place in my heart, for all its silliness.

I fear that that beginning paragraph sounds rather harsh. I enjoyed the game, mostly because I enjoy the primal experience of building an army of tanks and artillery and using it to just wreck shit, which this game provides in spades. I will say I really enjoyed the Eurogamer review of the game, from the year of the latter’s release, and it makes a lot of good points.

As I said, this game draws a lot from Generals, gameplay wise; there’s a version of the battle plans available at the American strategy center from the former game in all three factions of the latter. The resource gathering feels like the halfway point between Red Alert 3 and StarCraft. Base defenses feel closer to CNC than StarCraft, being formidable on their own and not so easily mobbed with basic units. The building is a clone of Generals, down to one faction having the builder be an infantry unit rather than a vehicle. That same faction has a black market, like the GLA, but it is involved with stealing units rather than generating cash (buildings can be built to do such a thing). You have CNC-style oil derricks.

What makes the game frustrating, at first, is the realization that most units are glass cannons, especially tanks. This makes any given mission prone to devolving into a war of attrition, based around economy and sheer patience, veering on resilience, on the part of the player. At least, it did for me until I remembered that upgrades exist, which then breaks the stalemate and turns the gameplay into the sort of tank mob I am fond of (I know it is monotonous, sometimes, but it scratches my animal urge to just wreck shit, when I’m in the right mood). Large formations of tier-two tanks and tier-one artillery, with some anti-air thrown in, will win you campaigns. That tendency towards glass cannons also makes artillery far more important than in comparable games in my experience.

All the glass cannon issues are tripled when concerning aircraft. When playing CNC games, I would often make flying units (comanches, helices, hammerheads, venoms, chopper-VXs, twinblades, harbingers, battle angels) and rip apart enemy bases, but was always careful enough to veer away from anti-air guns whenever possible. StarCraft games on the other hand never really had this issue as the base defenses were comparatively weaker; Terran battleships or Protoss carriers never had the issue. This game takes the CNC balancing and tilts it comically in favor of the anti-air guns; this renders plane-based support powers (another thing lifted from Generals) absolutely useless most of the time as one or two emplacements can cut them into paper. Like, I wanted to drop an atomic bomb, but it was cut down so quickly! Imagine if the Japanese had these guns in 1945! If I had to fix this, I would double if not triple the speed of the aircraft, as they are very slow: the EA CNC games did this well and added real uncertainty to air strikes, which this game should have had.

The tier-two tanks and tier-one artillery I mentioned previously tends to be weapons that historically existed in World War II, and it is telling that most missions can be won with only historical units and not the crazy science fictional units available later on. The most useful of these is an Allied tank that projects a large shield for aforementioned tank mobs. The Germans get a sonic tank and a small mecha of sorts (called an exo-skeleton, reminiscent of the human walkers in the Avatar movies, although this game predates them - and is prominently displayed on the cover art), as well as jetpack troopers (who likewise get mauled by anti-air to a comical degree). The Soviets have even bigger tanks than historically, a giant artillery gun that calls to mind the Schwerer Gustav more than anything else, and lots of cold-based weaponry (a bit stereotypical, but can be really annoying in the field).

In all these fancy doohickeys being easily beaten by historical weaponry, the game ends up reproducing a real dynamic of the actual Second World War in a way that cannot have been deliberate. Rather, the wonky balancing serves historical accuracy; what are ice tanks and exoskeletons and sonic tanks more than wunderwaffen, the overengineered monstrosities made by the Germans in our world in a desperate attempt to win the war when it was obviously lost to anyone actually paying attention. Most didn’t work; the war was won by the dependable Sherman in the West and by the equally dependable T-34 in the East. The Americans, in particular, were a massive economic engine that kept out-producing the Germans. Likewise, the zeppelins you can make as the Germans are sitting ducks for anti-air, which is why zeppelins were phased out as weapons of war in reality. In the game, focusing on the economy to mass produce Shermans (as an Allied player) will win you the battle. It’s not to the level of The Campaign for North Africa by any means, and it wasn’t even intentional, but it was a fun thing to notice.

The more interesting and clever things come in terms of the story, subverting a lot of expected plot beats of World War II alternate history, as well as RTS game stories. When looking at the campaigns, there are only two available: the Allies and the Germans. Starting the game, I thought that the Allied campaign would include both the Western Allies and the Soviets, but I turned out to be wrong; the Soviets are the ultimate villains. The two campaigns are ultimately two sides of a coalition defending Europe from a Soviet invasion after a peace agreement, which itself came after German rebels overthrew the Nazis.

In the menu you will see the Allied campaign first, and then the German campaign. This appears to encourage the player to go the Allied route, and then the German route, as I did. The Allied route is the more generic of the two, obligatorily fighting Nazis, and then fighting Soviets with German allies. The German campaign, on the other hand, only has you a loyal servant of the Nazi regime for at most two missions, when your commanding officer reveals to you he is trying to overthrow the Chancellor and ropes you in. In an eleven mission campaign, the German player only fights the Western Allies twice. Three of the remaining missions are fighting other Germans (one with Allied support), and the rest are fighting the Soviets. In other words, you are fighting a civil war as much as a world war, to the point of backing a military coup, something I’ve only seen in Tiberian Twilight with the New Adana insurrection. In my opinion more games should have military coups. There is storytelling potential there.

If you play the Allied campaign first, and then the German campaign second, you see the former colored by the latter in interesting ways. There are three missions that are played from different perspectives in each campaign, the other army being represented by an AI that is not particularly smart (there is a mission set in Poland where you, the Germans, have to defend an Allied base from the Soviets, and you practically have to babysit them). Unlike Red Alert 3 a year later, which did a multiplayer version of this, each mission told from different perspectives is subtly different in terms of the respective objectives, particularly the penultimate level, which feels like a proper massive battle with different flanks with different objectives. Unfortunately, the final battle, a gruelling siege of Moscow, plays almost identically for each army.

I find the lack of a Soviet campaign both narratively disappointing and somewhat problematic. The Soviets are the most ‘Eastern’ of the nations at play, as Russia and its empire have so often been considered, not entirely unreasonably, as more Asian than points west. This is often racialized unpleasantly; the Nazis considered Slavs to be subhuman and subsequently treated Eastern Europe far more brutally than Western Europe; in the latter, razing a village was a unique atrocity (see Oradour-sur-Glane or Lidice), while in the former it was de rigueur. Perhaps more chillingly, one recalls that Hitler originally wanted to ally with the British and the Americans to destroy the Soviets; in a game and a world where Hitler is killed early on, he ironically gets his wish.

I have complicated thoughts on that last bit. I think it is very telling that the studio that created this game is Hungarian, a country whose government (led by an Admiral without a Navy) allied with the Nazis, engaged in its own territorial irredentism, helped the Germans invade the Soviet Union, and then was invaded in turn by the Soviets who turned it into a puppet state that lasted until 1991. I cannot help but think that 1956, year the Soviet Army violently crushed a reform movement in that country (and grippingly retold in James Michener’s book The Bridge at Andau), hangs heavily over this game’s story. Having been released in 2007, the developers would likely have been born under Communist rule, known people who lived through 1956, and may well have seen the Soviets as the century’s great enemy more so than the Nazis (a not uncommon sentiment among certain segments of Eastern Europe; see the memorials to Nazi collaborators in Canada, put up by Eastern Europeans who hated the Soviets, or see also the neofascist groups in these countries that often feel similar, such as the Ukrainian Azov Battalion).

On the one hand, there’s a part of me that feels like this is whitewashing the Nazis a bit. On the other hand, I don’t want to minimize the very real suffering that the Soviets unleashed in much of Eastern Europe. But more concretely I think the story told, minus the fantastic weapons, is scarily plausible inasmuch I can imagine a world where this particular alignment of forces happened; indeed, after World War II the British had drawn up plans to invade the Soviet Union as a contingency. In this regard, I think the story succeeds the most, by doing what all great alternate history does: making it very obvious to you that the world we live in exists due to a great multiplicity of contingencies, any one of which going differently leading to a totally different result. But on a more visceral level, you are seeing recognizably Nazi tanks and troops and planes participate in what is cast as a somewhat heroic effort - but that dissonance is what makes that sense of contingency really work. It is a truly different world, not beholden to our aesthetic sensibilities, and where a stahlhelm may not conjure images of genocide.

As expected for games of this period set in World War II, the Holocaust and the other Nazi atrocities are not really dwelt upon (one of the only games I can think of in this ecosystem that does is Company of Heroes 2, which puts the player in charge of the liberation of Majdanek). These may be butterflied away by the assassination of Hitler, but the absence does give the plot an eerie quality (using ‘eerie’ as Mark Fisher did, as the absence of something that you feel should be there).

The game’s cutscenes are really, really good. Each campaign focuses on a few commandos and officers, so there is a good degree of character development. They bicker and complain and wish for things they get to do on leave or after the war, and you can get some affection for them. These cutscenes are obviously done in the game’s engine, but they are done with a certain cinematic verve that really escalates it (the crowning glory being the ending cutscene for a certain mission in France). Some of the personal drama, though, is a bit hackneyed, with each side getting a female commando who inevitably falls for a respective male commando. A detail, but a jarring one; the male commandos keep talking about their desire for ‘babes,’ a word that I don’t think had its modern slang meaning back then, and I can’t remember it being used in any period media, or even works from the sixties. I admit to being pulled out of the story by that a bit.

War Front: Turning Point is ultimately a curiosity, never really becoming a classic of its genres. But it is an enjoyable experience that does some interesting things narratively and gives your monkey brain plenty of opportunities to just break things in the way only RTS games can. There was potential, though, for something deeper, something more epic, and part of me is sad we won’t really get that. But, all in all, I enjoyed the experience.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Review: Bloodtide by Sophie Burnham

Sophie Burnham’s Bloodtide continues the Ex Romana trilogy started in Sargassa, peeling back more the story of Selah, her companions and rivals, and of the city of Sargassa herself

Sidewise Award-winning novel Sargassa by Sophie Burnham provided us with a setting and a vision of a world where the Roman Empire never fell. Part of the story of Selah, new Imperial Historian and the rest of her rivals, adversaries and contemporaries in the novel is finding out that the truth of history is somewhat more complicated than they believed, in the midst of a twisty conspiracy of imperial ambitions, secrets, plots and lies.

Bloodtide continues the story of Selah and the others in her orbit, in the fantastically imagined world of Sargassa.

From a plot perspective, in looking at Bloodtide I am going to skirt the big reveal of Sargassa, since it would not be fair to readers who have not read the first book in the series. Readers who have read the first book and are looking to see how Burnham can possibly follow up that big reveal don’t need to be reminded of what it was. So instead we will carry forward into the second novel and what it tries to do without referencing it.

Having assembled its characters as a rough and contentious group in Sargassa, Bloodtide for the most part scatters them to the winds. This second novel focuses less on Selah than the first novel, instead providing a lot of screentime to the other members of her somewhat contentious circle of colleagues and associates. Darius is in exile in the badlands, giving us a view of some of the rest of the continent and the price of his Javert-like obsessions for his investigations from the first novel. Arran and Theo, on the other hand, with the growing revelation that there is a lot more of the old solaric tech lying around than anyone ever suspected, go off to try and resurrect the power and communications arrays from long ago.

We get a greater sense of the scale of the revolutionaries and their opposition to Roman rule. Theo and Arran’s mission is predicated on a slow but smart bit of strategy—they realize that Sargassa casting off control by the Romans is a doomed enterprise, destined to be squashed quickly by the rest of the empire. But if they could coordinate across cities and towns by means of the solaric technology, then all the cities and settlements could rise up at the same time and make stopping the revolution much more difficult, if not impossible. It’s an excellent recognition of the tactics and necessity of coordination of a revolution. This puts me in mind of a Silverberg story where a revolution fails, and the revolters recognize, in hindsight, that they needed uprisings in more than just one city in order to have a prayer of success.

So, with Theo, Arran and Darius’s plotlines and adventures outside of Sargassa, Selah gets a lot less screentime, as do Tair and the plotline of the Iveroa stone and the spoilery revelations it contains. This means the often thorny relationship between Selah and Tair gets less play than, say, the budding relationship between Theo and Arran. Still, this is a novel with interesting and fascinating queer relationships, and a preponderance of characters who are not straight men. We get character development, growth and an intense look at these characters, just like in the first novel.

Like Sargassa, Bloodtide is not just queer-friendly; it is queer-forward. These are the queer-forward alternate history/future history SF novels you may not have known you wanted, but are here for you.

And then there is the titular Bloodtide, which is a large set piece of a flood in the city of Sargassa. All the characters who are in the city at the time confront what turns out to be a quite catastrophic storm for the city. Rain and flooding, and the inevitable stresses to civilized behavior that occurs afterwards. It’s a challenge for Selah and the others, not only for them to survive, but to help as much of the underclass as they can. (The Patricians, of course, are doing fine. Same as it ever was.) While the first novel made the social divide in Sargassa stark, here, in the midst of the storm that hits the city, the haves and have-nots, in the wake of a disaster, are even more starkly defined. I was reminded, and I believe the author intended it, of the wake of the utter disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Burnham does not pull her punches in depicting the devastation, which of course plays merry hell with the plans of our protagonists. It is a black swan event that none of them prepared for, and that they have to struggle to survive.

The Bloodtide can also be seen as a Chekov’s gun going off. In Sargassa we got the sense that the city built all the way to the shore was definitely susceptible to a storm and situation like this. In the first novel we have descriptions of lower-class areas of the city, Sinktown, that are prone to flooding in the best of times. And so we get not just tidal flooding, but a full-on hurricane and storm surge.

So is there another big reveal in Bloodtide? In a way, there is an extension of that big reveal, as in the final portion of this book we get a sense of more about it. While the novel has danced around the consequences of the world as it is now, a thing deliberately engineered to be misunderstood, the consequences of the reveal in Sargassa aren’t really explored. Selah and the others have, as you have seen, way too much going on to really think on what that reveal *means*. At the end of Bloodtide, however, we get a bifurcation of character knowledge and reader knowledge. Selah and the others come across information that they cannot quite decipher or understand, but the reader can definitely put the pieces together and come to a conclusion and a revelation that broadens and further extends the revelation in Sargassa. But it’s clear Selah and the others do not know what they have learned. The entire backstory is not clear, however; there are still questions as to the state of affairs, in addition to the unresolved character beats. But once again, the book remains relatively unique in its approach to worldbuilding.¹

My hope is that this sets up the final book in the trilogy and a broader set of revelations and things coming to a head. I’ve been quite entertained both by the characters and the fascinating and clever worldbuilding in the Ex Romana series, and I have high hopes for the third and final volume to stick the landing.

Highlights:

• Fantastic depiction of the set-piece disaster as the heart of the book.
• Excellent character beats.
• Deepens the worldbuilding of the first book and provides more context to the surprise of the first book.

Reference: Burnham, Sophie. Bloodtide [Daw, 2025].

¹ This makes it hard to compare this book to others as is my wont, because the books I can think of that tie into Ex Romana might inadvertently give a hint to the twist in the series and worldbuilding.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: No Such Thing As Duty by Lara Elena Donnelly

A blend of the historical and the speculative to linger on the concept of duty in a grim and everchanging world.

The viewpoint character of Lara Elena Donnelly's novella No Such Thing As Duty is William Somerset Maugham. You might have heard of him. An English writer who penned plays, short stories and novels, I certainly had, but knew very little about him beyond that briefest of bios. Nor did I until after I had finished writing my first draft of this review - a deliberate choice, wanting to preserve the experience of the story as a narrative-object, to linger in its tension and ambiguities, without collapsing them down with the intrusion of reality until I had at least captured the rough sense of my feelings in the amber of prose.

Because there are two No Such Thing As Dutys - the first is the one read by someone who knows Maugham's bibliography, the facts of his life and the reality, date and manner of his death. This is a version one must expect of any book which features historical facts, in any form. There is always someone who knows everything, especially when the subject is a famous author. The second is my experience.

At the start of the book, we meet Maugham arriving in a Romania in which he is certain he will die (and glad of it rather than being a Scottish sanatorium). He is suffering from tuberculosis, dizzy with fever and coughing up blood, but seemingly determined to do his duty before succumbing to the inevitable. Already, a branching point of the two experiences of the story. For me, this is tension - does he die in Romania? I don't know. He seems wearily certain of it, a spectre that looms over the story, that intrudes every time he coughs up blood into a handkerchief or a scarf conveniently dark to hide the stain. Arriving as a spy in wartime, he reports in to receive such mission as he might be needed for, following on from his promising activities with less promising outcomes in other fronts of the conflict. But he soon realises his mission, such as it is, seems more of a sop, a bone thrown to make him feel useful rather than something vitally necessary.

And thus, the central conflict of the book. The duty he's doing - to King and Country, as he says - what kind of duty is it, if it is this pity mission? He leaves behind a daughter he cares about and a wife he'd rather avoid, coming to die far away, and if it's not for duty, then what is it for? Are they not also a duty?

But he's there, and the mission is in front of him, and he's dying, so do it he does. And through the course of it, he meets two other key figures. One a man, Walter, seemingly walled off from any sense of duty - seemingly - and another a woman, Mme. Popescu, whose husband died of a duty he didn't even need to do. Three angles on the same problem, though mired firmly in Maugham's. The glimpses of the other two do however serve to colour and explore his, through the lens of his introspection.

And this - his self-critical, thoughtful, writerly narrative voice - is one of the most successful things about a roundly successful novella. I'm not familiar with Maugham's work in reality - another branch point, does his narrative voice sound like actual Maugham's - but I found myself quickly invested in the version of him that exists in Donnelly's. There's an analytical bent to the way he talks about the people around him, a distance that he himself names as he talks to other characters, and a slight rigidity to the prose that does nod back to the time at which the story is set, without overegging the historicity. But it's not just that. He is constantly dwelling on his imminent death (ironic or simply foreshadowing?), the effect that will have on his family, whether being here is the right thing to do, and if he even truly is doing his duty at all. He also dwells on two lost loves and one growing one, because all good things come in threes.

As with the three angles on duties, the three loves all inform one another, shaping how we see Maugham as much as how he sees himself. There's Sue, the woman he wishes he'd married but whom he lost to the man who got her pregnant (and married her out of - yes, there's duty again). There's Gerald, the outgoing soldier he knew in the Pacific, whose strengths shored up Maugham's weaknesses, and whose flaws could be forgiven, and critically who knew, as Maugham knows, when and how to keep hidden from society's eyes what it doesn't want to see. And then the present one, Walter - the man who walls himself off from duty, who refuses to hide himself as Maugham knows he must.

Intersections, wherever you look. Maugham - with his stutter, his orphan status and French early years already an outcast, clinging on to rigid propriety as close as his interpretation of duty. Walter flouting both but charming him in, while also being his mission, a part of his own duty and bound up in the death of Popescu's husband.

All of which leads to wondering about the reality of Maugham's duty - the clue is, indeed, in the title - but whether it's self-imposed too. All around him, people take the rules of society less seriously than he does, whether they be his British handler, the locals, Walter or Mme. Popescu. He dwells on how it was his duty to marry Syrie, the wife he's avoiding, after he got her pregnant. But was it truly? Was it a duty he could have avoided if he wanted to? Did he want to? Will he die in service to this thing that may never even really have been asked of him at all?

That tension and uncertainty about his death is why I resolved not to find out his biographical details until I had settled my thoughts. Because the poignancy of not knowing felt so delicious, and fed in so beautifully to the ethical crisis he was suffering through, that I wanted to treasure it as a lucky gift I chanced to have in reading it.

However, around half to two thirds through the novella, Donnelly introduces a speculative element which complicates things further. Obviously, there were no vampires involved in World War I. And so, however closely the narrative up to this point may (or may not) have married up to the real history and biography, here it diverges. The two experiences of the book briefly coalesce. But only briefly.

In my opinion, vampires are at their best when they are both truly dangerous and also, despite and because of the danger, sexy. In No Such Thing as Duty, the sexiness of the vampirism (and while a little understated, by god is Donnelly's vampire sexy) is corralled in by the physical - blood and bites and hands and tongues - just as the rest of the story is wedded to Maugham's own physicality, of his breath and cough and bleeding, his fever constantly waxing and waning, the scratch of fabric on skin, his enjoyment of food and drink. Donnelly revels in the sensation of drinks particularly, the haze of brandy and heat of coffee, and temperature more broadly - feverish burns and the cool touch of snow. And again, the lingering prophecy of Maugham's death informs this. We read his body in its frailty and potential failure; the vampirism marries that imminent death up with sex but also with the potentiality of death's forestalling.

And so, the two readings once again diverge and split even further. Is the intrusion of the fantastical about to change the facts, and a reader who knows whether Maugham will die about to be surprised by a change, or have their knowledge come to fruition, but its method shifted? And then, again, me, caught up only in the tension of the story itself. Vampires throw a spanner into the works of the greatest inevitability, and so add an extra layer of narrative uncertainty.

Right up to the end, Donnelly preserves that ambiguity. The story ends with implication rather than closure, a situation that made me very glad for my lack of knowledge, but one that, precisely because of the speculative elements, likewise imposes that ambiguity even on a reader who does know, because while the question of "if" might have been settled for them, there still lives a vast expanse of "how" and "why".

And so, ultimately, it doesn't matter if you know the facts or not. The story uses vampirism to crack open the vault of possibility, and ensure that the available endings are uncertain for any reader. I looked up the facts, and learnt that not only did Maugham live into his nineties, far beyond the scope of the life he sees as doomed in the story, but that even the foundation of the story rests on a branch untaken - the Scottish sanatorium the book's Maugham is glad to avoid was the path of reality. A reader who knew his biography was already wrong-footed, because it never cleaved to that reality in the first place. That break from the known path already introduced the potential for change, and the story could become one of the doomed path the real man didn't take.

No Such Thing As Duty wields its ambiguities and potentialities like a scalpel, all the while holding them in delicious contrast to the bitter realities of the physical and the flesh. By using a real historical figure and divorcing him from his reality, Donnelly ties her story to real anchors - there are hints and nods to real, biographical facts seeded throughout - without closing off the opportunities for tension, and the scope of possible endings. The fantastical element is also the most grounding one, the sections in which Maugham is being fed on being some of the most intimately real ones, where much of the rest of the story comes filtered through his particular lens of perception, held at a distance, or made hazy by illness. Only in contact with the unreal does the story fully rear up into feeling quite present. She leaves her questions open - this is not a story with an answer to its moral questions, any more than it is one to set a firm hand on the conclusion of its plot - and the work is all the better for it. It is a beautiful, brilliant book, with exquisitely understated prose and a skilfully managed viewpoint, and one that exemplifies what a good novella can do, or be, by using all its tools, figures and ideas all intersect and coalesce into a gorgeous mess of feeling and thought.

--

The Math

Highlights: Sexy but understated but sexy vampirism, triangulating around the concept of duty, well-crafted introspective viewpoint

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Lara Elena Donnelly, No Such Thing As Duty [Neon Hemlock, 2025]. 

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Review: Manchukuo 1987 by Yoshimi Red

Holding on and fighting on when your society is falling away

Mainstream Western alternate history fiction has a tendency to view Imperial Japan as a sidekick to the Nazis. This is doubtless because most writers in that tradition are Western and as such are more culturally comfortable writing about Germans rather than Japanese (and it’s not like the Italians get much devoted to them either). In Axis victory works, the Japanese are vaguely mentioned as ruling the Pacific most of the time when the action is set in America or Europe; the only major narrative alternate history about this that comes to me is Peter Tieryas’s trilogy beginning with The United States of Japan. That trilogy is very much influenced by anime, and has an accelerated pace of technological development to allow for mecha. Here, on the other hand, is what I believe to be the first instance of published alternate history involving a relatively realistic victorious Japan: Manchukuo 1987 by Yoshimi Red (published on Itch).

The novel is set somewhere between the fourth and fifth paintings of Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire. In this world, Japan has waged a number of costly, bloody, and ultimately pointless wars as it tries to hold onto its empire, which has only lasted as long as it has by virtue of never having to fight the Americans. Korea has already wrested its independence. Now, understanding that this last vestige of empire is now a sunk cost, the puppet state-cum-settler colony of Manchukuo is now about to be handed back to the Republic of China. But, of course, something goes wrong, and the wrong people end up in the wrong place.

This is a very grotty novel, and by virtue of its grottiness it refuses to engage in the common allohistorical trope of giving losers of a war in our world technology beyond our own. The novel is the story of a community and a way of life, that of Japanese settlers in Manchukuo, that is rapidly becoming superfluous. They are now encountering the fate which has encountered pied-noirs or Ulster Loyalists or Russians in the Baltic in our world: they love their imperial masters far more than their imperial masters love them back, and their identity is falling out from under them. What is the point in your way of life, when the object of your devotion openly views you as a drain? The Emperor becomes the butt of jokes and the segregation laws are now laxly enforced. Japanese youth now eat McDonald’s and pepper German slang liberally into their spoken Japanese. What is to be done, when their whole worldview is imploding?

This novel, in one sense, does something very common in mainstream alternate history, and it is in making a good chunk of its plot a detective novel. This only makes sense; the whole point of reading alternate history (and, let us be frank, the whole point of writing alternate history, as I can personally attest) is to poke around in another world, peeking in nooks and crannies for odd little details. On the novel’s Amazon page, Robert Harris’s Fatherland is openly cited as an influence; I can also detect more than a whiff of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which likewise involves a political order that is about to end for good. Our investigator, a Japanese settler, a soldier-turned-Kempeitai investigator with skeletons in his closet, is a bit more Xavier March than Meyer Landsman. He knows what he has done is wrong, and is ever-so-slightly beginning to realize that the whole basis of his life, indeed the whole basis of his identity as a Japanese settler in Manchuria, is based on something atrociously evil. This is coming into conflict with his own basic sense of decency, and it is that conflict that drives him deep into the underworld of Manchukuo, where he meets powers both Japanese and Chinese looking upon the ever-nearer handover with trepidation and fear.

But to call this simply a detective novel is to reduce a sprawling panorama of a society about to be liquidated to merely one of its several parts. It is a crime story, with a complex criminal underworld. There are the remnants of the military, who show up mostly as Kempeitai officers, who are dragging the embers of war with them wherever they go. There is the portrayal of a small teenage social circle whose life is upended by something shocking. There is the Chinese underclass that interacts with great trepidation with their Japanese overlords, and looks forward to the day that the Japanese will simply no longer be overlords. This novel takes the intimacy of a few characters, a few situations, and a whole little world slipping away and turns it into an epic of a time that never was. What makes this so compelling is that the novel’s characters feel both universal, with broadly equivalent situations throughout history, but also very of their world. Murakata could not exist in our world, even if he resembles a jaded French policeman in Algiers on the eve of Algerian independence; this novel is a very good demonstration of K. S. Villoso’s argument about how the best characterization and best worldbuilding in speculative fiction are deftly woven into one another.

Another thing that struck me about this novel is just how rich it is, on a literary level. There are plenty of little details that concatenate into something astounding, of course, but just on a prose level, it is striking. I expected this book to take me three days or so, but it ended up taking me four. I have a hard time pointing my finger at exactly what makes the prose like this (one user on a forum I’m on attributed the effect to run-on sentences that work surprisingly well), but I found this novel’s prose to be a rich, immersive experience, one that can’t be wolfed down too quickly. It has to be savored. It has to be taken a bit more slowly than other novels like it.

Thematically, one could say that the core of this novel is striving, or struggling, or enduring. Everyone here is looking towards the future with great anticipation, some positive, some negative. Criminals want to rule more, as does the Japanese ascendancy in Manchukuo, whereas the regular Chinese folk simply want to live free as the masters of their own destiny. Imperial Japan promised Asia a ‘co-prosperity sphere,’ but there are too many holes in the sphere that have, by the time of the setting of the novel, made themselves glaringly apparent. The Japanese, in particular, are facing the fact that all is vanity, that everything is temporary, that all empires fail. To quote a song about another historical empire: “what’s the point of it all/when you’re building a wall/and in front of your eyes it disappears?” The novel seems to make the case that there is a profound narcissism, a profound vanity, in trying to maintain an empire, a theme that is quite poignant as America lashes out to stave off obvious decline, as Russia turns Ukraine into a charnel house in a desperate attempt to remain relevant, and Israel razes Gaza to the ground and drags the Middle East into a conflagration in the search for an ever-more elusive permanent state of security (and we ought to remember what A. Dirk Moses said about ‘permanent security’).

I have not felt this way after reading an alternate history novel since I read Arturo Serrano’s novel To Climates Unknown back in 2021 (a series of events which culminated in Serrano becoming a good friend of mine, and me joining the staff of this illustrious blog). I have seen in Manchukuo 1987 what I want the genre of alternate history to be in the coming decades: a genre more human, more willing to see that history is not merely the province of stultifying, dreary, power-worshipping history books. I for one would look forward to a sequel to this book, and I certainly want to see more by Yoshimi Red.

Reference: Red, Yoshimi, Manchukuo 1987 (self-published, 2025).

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review: The Electric State

It's almost admirable how completely this film wastes a great concept

In an alternate 1990s, after an almost-successful robot rebellion was crushed with the last-minute help of human-operated telepresence drones, the defeated robots have been exiled to a huge secluded area in the southwestern US, and it's declared illegal for robots to be anywhere else. For some unexplained reason, this blatant act of forced displacement is called a peace treaty. Anyway, the plot proper begins when a runaway robot sneaks into a teenage girl's house and claims to be remotely operated by the little brother she thought had died years before. So she runs away with the robot, since she doesn't like her foster family anyway, and teams up with a smuggler who can get her into the zone where the surviving robots are confined, because that's where her brother's body is being kept. During this rescue mission, they uncover the evil secrets of the company that provides the world with telepresence drones, and create a new state of affairs where robots have a better chance of being free.

This rather average-sounding summary doesn't do justice to how aggressively generic the new Netflix film The Electric State is. Its cardboard characterizations, absolutely predictable beats, self-sabotaging style of humor, uninspired action sequences, unforgivably misjudged casting, overwritten dialogues, and toothless politics would suffice to render it just another forgettably mediocre Netflix production. What sets this disappointing exhibit of laziness apart is the fact that it purports to be an adaptation of the far more interesting illustrated novel of the same title published in 2018 by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. While the Netflix version goes out of its way to sand down its own themes and confine itself to family-friendly palatability, the source material was a scathing portrait of American modern vices: ubiquitous advertisements, irrational consumerism, and self-absorbed numbness. None of that commentary survives the adaptation process, because God forbid a Russo brothers character feel a true emotion or express a controversial viewpoint. The version of The Electric State they deliver is an empty carcass painted over with a cartoon smile.

Instead of its paint-by-numbers attempts at comedy or pathos, what actually reaches into the viewer's soul about this film is the unbelievably expert degree to which it avoids sparking any interest or empathy. Its happy scenes feel bland, its sad scenes come off as glib, its surprises are derivative, its scary bits are more deserving of embarrassment, and its appeal to righteous indignation doesn't know which value to care about. It's as if the Russo brothers had deliberately designed an experiment to craft a film that leaves every human emotion untouched. It doesn't even manage to provoke a memorable negative reaction: it should be boring, but it's too absurd for that; so it should be irritating, but it's too insecure for that; so it should be tiresome, but it's too scattershot for that; so it should be confusing, but it's too preachy for that; so it should be offensive, but it's too insincere for that. This production so fundamentally misunderstands what makes movies work that it may as well have been made by its robot characters.

To mention just one of many missed opportunities: in 2005's The Island, a universally and justly disliked movie, the villain has a henchman hunting down our protagonists because they're legally less than people, until the henchman has a moment of reflection and realizes that he, as a Black man, has a common cause with the targets he's chasing. He rebels against the villain explicitly because he knows what happens when a category of people is treated as less than people. As it happens, The Electric State also has a Black henchman hunting down our protagonists because they're legally less than people, and he also ends up rebelling against the villain, but somehow the movie never makes the obvious connection. The reason given for this plot point is the least imaginative possible. It should be cause for alarm for any movie that The Island has a clearer sense of its own stance than you.

Even with the mangled plot that was used instead of the original, The Electric State could have made urgently relevant points about the evils of inventing separate categories of personhood, the possibilities of resistance under total oppression, the temptation to replace the harshness of real life with a soothing fantasy, or the danger of inputting profit and human life in the same equation. This could have been a strong story, both by its own merits and in relation to our times. But perhaps it's an even more telling reflection of our times that the duo of the most successful directors in the history of cinema have settled for building the appearance, rather than the intention, of having something to say.

--

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Sargassa by Sophie Burnham

A queer and fearless novel of love, duty, and rebellion in a Rome that never quite fell.

Selah Kelios is the new Imperial Historian in the distant colony city of Sargassa, far from the center of the Roman Empire but high in pride and strength. Her father has just died (honestly, assassinated) and so she has been thrust into his role as Imperial Historian at a young age. Her father has left some secrets (as well as the secret of who assassinated him and why) and as Selah tries to uncover them, it’s the social bonds, and the bonds of love and relationships that tangle Selah and those around her, that are all the more important.

All this is the story of Sargassa, by Sophie Burnham.

Longtime readers of me know that, in the tradition of the meme of “men thinking about the Roman Empire”, I resemble that remark. I’ve thought about the Roman Empire since I first heard about it, more than 40 years ago. So, novels, fantasy and otherwise set in the Roman Empire, or Roman Empires than didn’t fall, et cetera, are catnip to me. It has been a few years, though, since I’ve read one that has satisfied me. “Roman Empire never fell” books often feel like pantomimes or pallid continuations of ancient society without any real growth, change, evolution or development. This really goes even against the spirit of Rome itself. Rome of 250 BC, before the Punic Wars, is a very different place than 146 BC, at the fall of Carthage and of Corinth, different than 45 BC, with Julius Caesar at his height, 5 AD, at Augustus’ high point before the disaster in Germany, 110 AD, Hadrian and building the wall in Britain, and so on. Writing, speaking, army composition, society, all the details of Roman life changed over the centuries. And that doesn’t even get into what 9th century A.D. Byzantium might look like to a Roman from 100 BC.

Happily, Sargassa avoids that trap. Sargassa is a major Roman city that by contextual clues appears to be somewhere in North America. There is some digging one can do in the book to piece together the world situation, but that’s not the worldbuilding Burnham really is interested in--there is no map, and a map would be beside the point. Instead Burnham is interested in what Roman society, in a city far from Rome, is like after rising from a dark age (the mysterious “Quiet” that gets mentioned a lot in the book). Some things are still the same. There are patricians and plebs, client-patron relationships. Sargassa is ruled by a Consul. But then there are differences. Evolutions from the Rome of textbooks and historical novels. There are a class of people called Verna, which sit in a very precarious social relationship with plebs, patricians and the rest of society. Religion is focused on a mother goddess figure (Christianity apparently exists, but never became the state religion in this world). Selah, although a woman, gets to be a paterfamilias in the wake of her father’s death, which would never fly back in the time of the ancient Roman Empire. So we get a built up web of a world in Sargassa, as a Roman society building back from a dark age, trying to recapture things that were lost, but going forward. Selah’s role as Imperial Historian is to try and help preserve some of the lost and glorious past.

And while the book is about Selah and a MacGuffin from that glorious past, and the question of who killed her father and why, it is also really much more about the relationships in the book. Selah’s very complicated relationship with her lover Tair, at first in flashback and then Tair's unexpected return. Selah’s half brother Arran. Arran's role and status as being Selah's half-brother is complicated from the get go and his drifting for meaning and life draws him into contact with another POV character, Theodora, who goes by Theo. Arran’s complicated is-this-a-romance with the nonbinary Theo is further complicated by the fact that Theo works for a revolutionary underground. Thus, these four are four of our five main points of view (Selah being primary), coming from very different social castes and situations in Sargassa society, the evolution of Roman society (as seen above). How they all eventually converge and interact really is the matter of the book. How these four deal with what is happening, to their city and to each other, is the reason to keep turning pages. Burham does an excellent job in point of view in showing the strata and roles of Roman society The relationships, brotherly, sisterly, queer, and otherwise really make this book what it is and give it its potency. Secrets, lies, the secrets of the heart, both confessed and otherwise, all under the slow burning of the aftermath of Selah’s father’s death.

Our fifth point of view is a bit different and is somewhat off the map compared to the others, and that is Darius. Darius provides us the “interior government role” as a law enforcement officer. Darius fits in as our “straight man” to the quartet of the primary POV characters (which is an apt pun, come to think of it). He utterly represents the establishment, the old guard of this new Roman society. He also fills in the “last incorruptible man” slot in the murder mystery strand of the book. He has been told by the powers that be to investigate the death of the Imperial Historian in a very specific way...but Darius wants to, bless his heart, actually find out the truth. It doesn’t really spoil anything to tell you that this approach doesn’t go that well for Darius.

At the three quarter mark, however, the novel changes. I know the conflicting theories and opinions about the nature, use and validity of spoilers are a thing, but I think in the case of this novel, the less I say about the last quarter of the book, the better. It reframes the entire previous book to that point, and to what Burham is doing here. It doesn’t make any of her ideas and her explorations of revolution, class warfare, society and the costs, personally and otherwise, of repression any less valid. If anything, those ideas she explores get turbocharged by the turn at the three quarter mark and to its conclusion. We spend three quarters of the book with a murder mystery, a character web, and a building of a world and society and conflicts, social and societal for them...and then, well, that would be telling.

This does make giving references to books that are similar difficult--because the books I am thinking of that resonate really strongly with Sargassa also rhyme with that three quarter mark turn that I am really trying to not spoil here. I think that telling you it is there does better than to leave it a complete surprise, you’ll watch for it now, and it will be an interesting extra fillip for you to watch out for as the rest of the pleasures of the book unfold.

The book is the start of a series and there really isn’t a good offramp here. I think it would be amazingly difficult to even try, given the last quarter of the book. There is a lot of the world, and the implications of the world left to explore in the projected next two books. I really want to see where Burham goes with this. I know for a lot of people waiting for a trilogy to complete before buying the first book is their power move (as bad as it is for sales of the original book). Thus, if my review has moved you, I do hope you will give Sargassa a try...be it by borrowing it from the local library, audio, or what have you. Burham has something interesting and wondrous going on here and I hope she gets the chance to continue to explore it.

--

Highlights:

• Rich and detailed worldbuilding on a social and societal focus

• Excellent set of protagonists and points of view 

• The three quarter turn in this book...watch for it.

Reference: Burnham, Sophie, Sargassa [Daw, 2024]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: To Turn the Tide by S. M. Stirling

An argument about the Roman Empire that masquerades as a time travel into a alternate history novel.

It’s not often that one finds that the end of the book is what a reader might consider reading first. Usually an afterword of a book is best read in the aftermath of the book, when the reader’s thoughts can gel and coalesce and get a peek behind the curtain. It has happened, though, that said peek behind the curtain feels like it is oddly placed, that it should be in a foreword, or if it was a standalone piece altogether. Or, that the afterward and its arguments is the dog, and the book is the tail. 

In this context I want to talk about S.M. Stirling’s To Turn the Tide. 

But let’s go back to the end of the book before we get into the meat and potatoes of the actual book. The title is “For Nerds like Me: Concerning Technological Innovations and Time Travel”. Stirling begins with what is exactly on the tin, talking about works such as Lest Darkness Fall, The Man who Came Early, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and others. What follows is a long essay on the practicalities of what and how history and technology could be changed. There is a lot of discussion (which winds up in the book by the characters themselves) about the practicalities of providing technological innovation, and what kinds of innovation can be brought. There is also a lengthy discussion of the history of the Roman Empire at the time of the Marcomannic Wars in terms of society and technology and its impending fall. Oh, and for good measure, mentions of the mutability of history in general

But the thing is, this afterward is written in a tone and style as if you hadn’t actually just read the book itself, which I found peculiar. The ending of the essay even says “To find out more, you will have to read To Turn the Tide and its sequels”. And while the essay sets a lot of things up, it remains in terms of characters and plot mostly non-spoilery. It’s an academic argument from a non-academic on a number of levels that the book seems to have been written once the afterword was done, to see what it would look like as a story, rather than an essay.

And so we can now actually turn to the book that seems to put its own afterward into practice. 

To Turn the Tide starts in early 2030’s Vienna, where a scientist has invited several Americans to his house. They all have gotten to Vienna and the House before the world has decided to go to hell. As they learn the professor has built a time machine, a global thermonuclear war of the highest and fullest order breaks out, and a fusion bomb dropped on Vienna activates the machine and sends the professor and the Americans to 165 CE. The Americans are not murdered (although the professor does die) thanks to the intervention of a merchant who decides not to rob and kill the stunned mysterious travelers who seemed to fall from the sky. With the merchant’s help, the Americans get themselves on their feet, find that the Professor had packed a lot of money and gear (it was clear he was going to bring them all back before the bomb forced his hand) and now they have to make a life here. Going back or avoiding changing history (à la the concerns in Island in the Sea of Time) are impossible, given the nuclear war. They have to make the best of it. But they know a bunch of the outlines of history, and know in the next couple of years, a massive German invasion is coming (the Marcomannic Wars). Arthur and his friends decide they need to survive, and to prop up Marcus Aurelius and the Roman Empire... and keep it from sliding downward (they’ve seen Gladiator, they know who Commodus is). And so a story begins as the Americans try to use the money and goods they have (including a lot of seeds, of things like potatoes, chilies and tomatoes) to introduce positive change for the Empire, starting in Pannonia.  And, Arthur knows the formula for gunpowder.

The book is very heavy on its historical and technological arguments, and of course the nuts and bolts of trying to bootstrap technological changes from the wheelbarrow to gunpowder. This means the characterization of the characters is a bit lacking. Arthur Vanderberg, who soon becomes Artorius, gets the most of the book. He’s the veteran, and as the book goes more and more oriented toward the war with the Germanic tribes headed into Pannonia, he gets more and more screen time, he is the hub that the other Americans run around. It’s no surprise that when the Americans’ place in the world goes up, he’s the one that’s considered the leader and rises the farthest and highest. We really understand his deal, but we get lesser and varying degrees of motivation and drive from the others. One of them, Filiipa Chang, gets a same sex relationship that looks like a deliberate inversion of a relationship in another Stirling castaway in time novel, Island in the Sea of Time. Two of the other Americans not very convincingly and later in the book pair off with each other, leaving one unattached completely.  Given that intimate relationships are the major way the book drives character development, the book falls down significantly on that score.

There is a lot of playfulness, though, with the characters even given that thinness here with the Americans making lots of movie and book references and having a mentality that readers can identify with. Unlike a lot of previous time travel castaway novels, this is a novel where the characters come to terms with it immediately, and they have done the reading and viewing, as it were (the aforementioned Lest Darkness Fall gets explicitly talked about by the characters). There are other fun bits too, as when the Americans, now that they have tomatoes and chilies, decide to introduce the Romans to Texas pit style barbecue...and the Romans go gangbusters for it. There is even a cameo by a character from another time travel novel that is set in the same time and place that I will allow the reader to find and discover. I didn’t recognize her at first, but later, when I re-read the section, it's obvious who it is. 

Marcus Aurelius himself becomes a character in the book, with a point of view. The book has, as many people interested in him do, a bit of a crush on the man, as he is clearly more intelligent and clever than many of those around him, and he comes to accept the strangers with their newfangled ideas far more readily than perhaps reason would allow. I get the feeling that out of the “Good Emperors”, Marcus is clearly Stirling’s favorite. And Verus, his co-emperor, is definitely depicted as a slacker nobody remembers (to be fair, even today, most people who know Marcus Aurelius don’t even remember Verus was co-emperor with him until he died of the plague). 

The action sequences, and they get bigger and more prominent as the book goes along, are a draw for readers who like that sort of thing. Are you the kind of person who saw the battle at the beginning of Gladiator (a movie the characters have seen!) and thought “adding a primitive gun barrage to this fight would make it even cooler?” If that is the case, then there is a lot for you to love. There are long stretches of the book that are ticking over technological changes and development, and then there is the sharp shock of war, described in bloody and serious detail. War is definitely hell. Even as Arthur tries to develop primitive gunpowder weapons, he can’t get the Romans to Napoleonic level technology where gunpowder weapons are everything in a battle (the book is heavy on how much things can change and how much materiel can actually be produced; it does a great job in showing the gunpowder weapons as a force multiplier but not the be all of warfare, but Stirling has a great admiration for Romans, and has the characters point out how easily the Romans borrowed technological ideas from rivals and neighbors, and so they take up the gunpowder weapons similarly).

But is the book worth reading? Who is this book for? I think this book is for the kind of people who would read that afterword first, and would be excited to see it in action. It’s a book that, with its afterword in the lead, is making historical arguments about the Roman empire, technology and history, with the fates or even development of the characters as somewhat of a secondary concern. In some ways it is a definite evolution of some of Stirling’s thought given his previous time travel, alternate history books, showing development of his thinking on how things could be changed, but in other ways, there is a bit of a regression on the character front. Arthur and his friends don’t quite stand up to, say, Captain Alston and the islanders of Nantucket in terms of memorability, save for Arthur. 

I personally enjoyed the book, given its focus on alternate history, history, and thinking about a subgenre and the practicalities of time travel, changing history and a reconsideration of the reign of Marcus Aurelius and the Roman Empire. It’s not a book for those who are deeply invested in the characters and their lives and growth and development as much, I am afraid. 

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Intensely interesting worldbuilding and piece of life in Pannonia 165 CE as the Americans are dropped into it.

• Deep consideration of the problems of technological change and development and theories of history

• A Baen cover that doesn’t hurt the eyes

• Notably weak on characters, even the lead. 

My rating? That's tough. For me as a writer, it hits a solid 8 out of 10. If the characters had more depth to them, it would be an easy nine. But the characters really drag down the final score a whole point. And if you aren't interested in time travel, the problems of the Roman Empire, et cetera, that 8 score is generous and this book is probably Not For You. (See what I mean?)

Reference: Stirling, S. M.,  To Turn the Tide  [Baen, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: The Glory of the Empire

Contingency springs eternal

One of the things that consistently provides me with a mild degree of amusement as an alternate history fan is how writers from other genres, and especially outside the speculative fiction scene, and especially outside of genre fiction, accidentally reinvent alternate history. Mystery and thriller writers doing it is one thing, as alternate histories can provide interesting new settings for such plots (some of the best writing in the genre is from authors from those traditions trying their hand at it; I can name The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, Fatherland by Robert Harris, and Dominion by C. J. Sansom as good examples thereof), but ‘literary’ types doing it is something else. Part of me finds it funny that writers from a tradition that derides science fiction and fantasy as focusing on setting to the detriment of character find their way to a subgenre whose setting is perhaps the defining feature. Of course, that doesn’t mean they always do it well—I found Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America to have an ending that would never be taken seriously in a genre space (although the HBO miniseries improved on that substantially), and I found Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham to not have a clear idea of what to do with the premise. It is with all this baggage I encountered Jean d’Ormesson’s 1971 novel The Glory of the Empire, originally published by Éditions Gallimard, with its English translation released in 2016 and published by the New York Review of Books.

Earlier than most, d’Ormesson invents textbook-style alternate history (a subgenre with pre-d’Ormesson antecedents in works such as H. G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come), almost contemporaneously with Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail, a book by an economist which set the stage for much of alternate history, professional and amateur, that followed it; you can feel its echoes still felt today if one knows where to look. Indeed, I kept thinking of Sobel as I read d’Ormesson, so similar are they in their conceits and yet so different in terms of subject matter. Sobel’s book is known for its commitment to paralleling, some would argue satirizing, academia with its in-universe scholarly debates and its pages upon pages of nonexistent sources in its bibliography. d’Ormesson does all of that, to my great surprise, but in some ways he goes further than Sobel.

On its face, The Glory of the Empire is simply a cipher, where history goes mostly the same as ours with one historical element replaced with a fictional element. Here, the Roman Empire never rises, and in its place rises a Mediterranean colossus that is only ever referred to as the Empire, which is governed from a capital only ever referred to as the City. d’Ormesson deliberately leaves the details vague, which in modern alternate history circles would either be tarred as lazy writing or understood as a sign that the work has another focus (it’s not alternate history, but see the hand wringing over the implausible politics of Alex Garland’s film Civil War vis-à-vis its narrative focus on the actual human experience of civil wars to get an idea). As my dear friend Gary Oswald has argued, if you don’t have a traditional narrative, your history has to be good to make up for it, but d’Ormesson, not confined by the arcane discussions of hobbyists, has taken a third option: a meditation on the meaning of history itself.

The book is written like a textbook, and one of a style that feels like something out of 1971 if not before; indeed, the earlier parts of the book read almost like an old chronicle. The text is awash in references to nonexistent historians that d’Ormesson’s alter ego has consulted; there are even footnotes! These historians are squabbling, deeply funny to history nerds like myself, but I wonder if it may come off as obtuse to general readers. He also invokes many real historians and other historical figures, such as Walt Whitman and Vladimir Lenin, to enliven the commentary, and provides cartons of Easter eggs to aforementioned history nerds.

The broad contours of the Empire’s history are essentially Roman history from the mythical foundation by Romulus and Remus to the fall of Constantinople put in a blender and made into a peculiar but surprisingly tasty nutrient shake. You have the ancient creation myths, the squabbling of cities and the eventual consolidation of the heartland, the conquest of the surrounding areas, the succession disputes and civil wars, the barbarians, and all that jazz. Admittedly, the religious aspect can be a bit confusing, and I’m not entirely sure where Christianity fits in. In any case, it’s something of a funhouse mirror of European history, and it gets stranger as you move East. The Empire, after a certain point in the book, begins to resemble the Mongols more than anything else, marching ever eastward, becoming the greatest power the world had ever known.

There are a number of figures that take center stage during the course of the book, fitting for a work whose scope spans several centuries. Some are clearly mythical, with a generous description of latter-day mythmaking served alongside the historiography. But the most compelling of these characters is by far Emperor Alexis, who would be given the mantle of ‘main character’ if one absolutely had to be chosen. His life seems mythical, and d’Ormesson deliberately doesn’t let you know what, exactly, is ‘real’ about him. He has a properly epic story, from a life of mind-dulling hedonism in Alexandria, to wandering ancient Asia learning and dispensing wisdom, to returning to the Empire as its savior à la King Arthur in the hour of its greatest need. Through Alexis, who in this world seems to be all the virtues said to be held by a constellation of Classical-age luminaries rolled into one, d’Ormesson is asking a rather big question: what is heroism without the scaffolding of circumstance behind it? What does that mean for a civilization which, through its great men, inspires civilizations beyond its own fall?

The decision to never name the Empire or its capital city, or even to provide a proper location of its heartland (although it is definitely along the Mediterranean somewhere, and I got the impression that it was at some undisclosed point on the Italian peninsula), reminded me of the Race, the invading aliens in Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series (incidentally, the series that got me into alternate history). The Race has homogenized itself to the point that it needs no other signifiers for itself, nor for its government; before meeting humanity, there’s no ‘other’ to define themselves by. In d’Ormesson’s novel, the namelessness of the Empire is in in-universe terms murkier than in Turtledove’s work, but in a Doylist sense it is very clear: it is the Empire, and nobody would bother thinking of any other upon hearing that word. The West likes to define itself as the successor to Rome and Greece, as does Russia to the Kievan Rus (to Ukraine’s great chagrin), and China to the Qin, among many other examples. Even as history grinds all things beautiful and sordid into dust with the passage of time, people like to define themselves as the clear successors to some historical entity, not acknowledging that change renders a complete continuity of essence laughable, something like how the human body replaces almost all of its cells every seven years or so.

This all becomes more clever at the ending (spoilers for a fifty-year-old book incoming), where, through what is admittedly more than a little jerry-rigged, history returns to something we would recognize. So much of the alternate history genre is committed to questions of contingency and of inevitability, be it the course of wars or the course of empires. Doing enough of this sort of thinking, I found the truth in what Buddhists call ‘anatta,’ or ‘non-self,’ the idea that nothing has a fixed essence, as its constituent parts can be recombined in myriad ways. In other words, nothing is inevitable. Most alternate history does this by changing the past and seeing what other presents could happen; d’Ormesson does something I would have thought to be impossible to do in a compelling manner until I read this book: change the past that leads to our exact present. It’s a deeply weird way of going about things, but it throws the contingency of everything into stark relief.

I am mildly appalled that it took me wandering around my local library to learn of The Glory of the Empire. It’s the sort of book that alternate historians like me should love; indeed I love it for what it has done, although it confused me at times (but many great books do). History as a discipline is about asking ‘why?’ The speculative genres are about asking ‘what if?’ d’Ormesson has blended the two here in a way I’ve never seen before, and the end result feels very new, despite it being half a century old! It’s a book that hammered into me the point that everything could have been different. It is an unmooring experience in the best way possible.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Reference: d'Ormesson, Jean. The Glory of the Empire [Éditions Gallimard, 1971].