![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Fiction
John Birmingham, After America: Reading this, I kept thinking about Rudyard Kipling. Birmingham is an excellent adventure writer with a great sfnal imagination who has totally bought into the Huntington “Clash of Civilizations” thesis. This is the second book in a series, which begins when an unknown force wipes out every living soul in a great teardrop shape covering most of the continental U.S. and significant portions of Mexico and Canada, so that what is spared of the U.S. is only Portland and surrounds, Hawai’i, Alaska, and Americans overseas including a large portion of the military. Among other things, this results in an Israeli nuclear first strike, an Indo-Pakistani nuclear conflict, and the expulsion of many dark-skinned immigrants (and second- and third-generation citizens) from the UK, all of which are background.
The narrative focuses on the President (a former civil engineer), a retired assassin brought back into active duty when someone tries to kill her husband and baby daughter, a South American immigrant trying to take advantage of the new U.S. settlement rules which award land to people willing to homestead, and a couple of other characters, including a Polish army officer gaining U.S. citizenship via military service and a child soldier brought to the U.S. to engage in jihad in the hotly contested/pirated/looted ruins of NYC. Basic message: the American dream is the right one; a lot of the people who epitomize the American dream are immigrants. Main bad guys: Muslims (there is one progressive Muslim character who helps the assassin). Secondary bad guys: white supremacist Americans from the breakaway Texas Republic. The President even says that they lost sight of the true American dream, so we know it’s true. Greens (a powerful party, given that Portland’s citizenry now represents a substantial percentage of America’s) take a whupping too—they ought to know that genetically engineered crops are the only hope now that the heartland is a wasteland. And Americans in the military are too politically correct, according to the Polish officer, uncomfortable with racial slurs even when they have no problems killing a group of African Muslims. I have the feeling that Birmingham, an Australian, is working through some sort of “I love humanity; it’s people I hate” thing with America/Americans.
On the one hand, Birmingham recognizes that every character has reasons for his (or occasionally her) beliefs and actions. Almost everyone does brutal things in order to survive; there are no innocents. On the other, Muslims are piratical rapists determined to wipe out all non-Muslims, so it’s pretty clear which non-innocents Birmingham thinks have the better claims. It was just hard for me to follow the adventures of the protagonists, which had plenty of drama, without thinking about all the other people—mostly from Africa and Asia—dying from nuclear fallout, uprooted from the lands of their birth, or otherwise devastated, and wondering about how their stories would have gone.
Lynn Flewelling, Shadows Return: Fourth in the Nightrunner series: Alec and Seregil, expert covert operatives, confront more challenges in the service of Skala. No one would ever accuse Flewelling of putting the mellow in drama; this time our heroes are captured, separated, and enslaved. Slavery is pretty grim: the system depends on widespread rape and torture, though we only get up close and personal with the latter. Alec’s new owner uses him for mysterious and fairly disgusting magical purposes while Seregil’s turns out to be a very old enemy. Fast and satisfying, though a little light on palace intrigue; I was glad I had the next book to start right after.
Lynn Flewelling, The White Road: This book didn’t keep me on tenterhooks the way the previous one did, but it was a solid enough continuing adventure, with Alec and Seregil dealing with the consequences of the previous books, including an unexpected magical being whose very existence puts their lives in danger from multiple sides. Again, I wanted more interaction with the Skalan queen, who distrusts and fears our heroes even though they’re sworn to work for her.
The narrative focuses on the President (a former civil engineer), a retired assassin brought back into active duty when someone tries to kill her husband and baby daughter, a South American immigrant trying to take advantage of the new U.S. settlement rules which award land to people willing to homestead, and a couple of other characters, including a Polish army officer gaining U.S. citizenship via military service and a child soldier brought to the U.S. to engage in jihad in the hotly contested/pirated/looted ruins of NYC. Basic message: the American dream is the right one; a lot of the people who epitomize the American dream are immigrants. Main bad guys: Muslims (there is one progressive Muslim character who helps the assassin). Secondary bad guys: white supremacist Americans from the breakaway Texas Republic. The President even says that they lost sight of the true American dream, so we know it’s true. Greens (a powerful party, given that Portland’s citizenry now represents a substantial percentage of America’s) take a whupping too—they ought to know that genetically engineered crops are the only hope now that the heartland is a wasteland. And Americans in the military are too politically correct, according to the Polish officer, uncomfortable with racial slurs even when they have no problems killing a group of African Muslims. I have the feeling that Birmingham, an Australian, is working through some sort of “I love humanity; it’s people I hate” thing with America/Americans.
On the one hand, Birmingham recognizes that every character has reasons for his (or occasionally her) beliefs and actions. Almost everyone does brutal things in order to survive; there are no innocents. On the other, Muslims are piratical rapists determined to wipe out all non-Muslims, so it’s pretty clear which non-innocents Birmingham thinks have the better claims. It was just hard for me to follow the adventures of the protagonists, which had plenty of drama, without thinking about all the other people—mostly from Africa and Asia—dying from nuclear fallout, uprooted from the lands of their birth, or otherwise devastated, and wondering about how their stories would have gone.
Lynn Flewelling, Shadows Return: Fourth in the Nightrunner series: Alec and Seregil, expert covert operatives, confront more challenges in the service of Skala. No one would ever accuse Flewelling of putting the mellow in drama; this time our heroes are captured, separated, and enslaved. Slavery is pretty grim: the system depends on widespread rape and torture, though we only get up close and personal with the latter. Alec’s new owner uses him for mysterious and fairly disgusting magical purposes while Seregil’s turns out to be a very old enemy. Fast and satisfying, though a little light on palace intrigue; I was glad I had the next book to start right after.
Lynn Flewelling, The White Road: This book didn’t keep me on tenterhooks the way the previous one did, but it was a solid enough continuing adventure, with Alec and Seregil dealing with the consequences of the previous books, including an unexpected magical being whose very existence puts their lives in danger from multiple sides. Again, I wanted more interaction with the Skalan queen, who distrusts and fears our heroes even though they’re sworn to work for her.