I enjoy science fiction.  It's good escape literature, but, at its best, it is a vehicle for thought experiments—asking "what if" such-and-such were true.

Charles Stross is one of my favorite SF authors.  He's good at world-building, the SF art of creating a convincing imaginary background for his stories, he's good at asking "what if" questions and he's good at creating thrilling action-adventure plots.

But I can't recommend any of his recent books because they're all parts of long series of novels that are hard to understand unless you've read the preceding books.

His current book, Invisible Sun, is the third book in a trilogy, which is a sequel to a previous series (three or six books depending on which edition you've read). There's lots of stuff that needs explaining if you're entering the series at this point.

But I think it is worth writing about because of its interesting premise—a possible inter-dimensional nuclear war between two North American republics, both ostensibly developed to liberty and justice, but products of different histories in different time lines.

One is an exaggerated version of the present US warfare / surveillance state, in which Washington, D.C., has been wiped out by a nuclear weapon planted by terrorists from a different time-line. 

The other is the newly-independent New American Commonwealth, threatened by a global French Empire, a British royal family in exile and now by Alternate USA.  

A defector explains threat Alternate USA poses to New America:

They're a planetary hegemonic power with a very aggressive foreign policy, a tendency to project their own worst intentions onto others, and a system that makes it really difficult to back down from a fight.  Any leader who shows weakness hemorrhages support with the electorate, and the foreign affairs hierarchy is structured to systemically filter out doves and promote hawks.

If they look at us and think we're weak, they'll try to manipulate us, and if they look on us and see their own mirror image—a nuclear-armed superpower with pare-time capability and a revolutionary ideology, they may panic and attack.  Possibly with a nuclear first strike.

The founders of the New American Commonwealth were aware of the history of our timeline and wrote a constitution intended to avoid the mistakes made by the founders of the USA.  A character's said New America's constitution had a closer resemblance to the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran than it did to the 1789 Constitution of the USA.  

Now, the Iranian government overthrown in a CIA coup in 1953 was a democratic government.  The Shah's dictatorship, which replaced it, lasted for 26 years.  The Islamic Republic of Iran has lasted 42 years despite continuous economic warfare and covert action against it.

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philebersole | November 30, 2021 at 2:58 pm | Categories: The Passing Scene | URL: https://wp.me/pMUbO-q4v
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