Goldwag's Journal on Civilization

A week ago, the Supreme Court of the United States decided to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act, clearing the way for Southern states to reimpose discriminatory maps that strip representation from African-American populations. This follows in the wake of a series of SCOTUS diktats reversing landmark civil rights legislation, including Shelby County in 2013 and Rucho in 2019, granting states a green light to gerrymander districts to their heart’s content, and blocking any efforts at remediation. As a lawyer working in the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, John Roberts opposed the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, and argued for its reinterpretation. Having lost that battle to the legislature, he has now simply rewritten the statue by force majeure.

So, what is to be done about this?

There is increasing discussion of court reform among Democrats, whether that be simply adding more justices, instating term limits, applying an actual enforceable ethics code, or more sweeping reorganizations. I am in favor of all of these, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Whether court reform can be accomplished by the next Democratic administration is a question that will depend on the next few elections, and more specifically, whether we can win the kind of majority that seems impossible in such a polarized system. Such a question is out of our hands right now. We’ll just have to wait and see. But regardless of the election results in 2026 and 2028, we need to begin approaching judicial politics with an entirely new perspective.

The emergence of the conservative SCOTUS majority, and its wildly partisan approach to politics, is a complex topic with a lot of history. Many people point to the defeat of nominee Robert Bork in 1987 as a “radicalizing” moment for conservatives, the growth of the Federalist Society as a powerful force within Republican politics, and more broadly, the backlash to integration and the Civil Rights Movement that led to the creation of a conservative intellectual movement dedicated to rolling back the achievements of the Warren Court—though, of course, it’s politically incorrect to suggest any connection between that and the modern conservative legal movement. All of this is true.

But I think it’s worth discussing the evolution of the Supreme Court as an institution, beyond mere partisan control, and the growth and metastasis of what we might call “the constitutional law industrial complex” or perhaps “the juristocracy” as a major contributing factor to the situation we face now, where the court regularly acts with total disregard for law and precedent.

What do I mean by that? First of all, the network of relationships, institutions, and professional networks that the current SCOTUS as an institution is firmly buttressed by. Justices of the Supreme Court come from a very narrow set of professional background these days; of the current nine, eight attended Yale or Harvard Law School (Amy Coney Barrett attended Notre Dame), and eight served as judges on appellate courts (Elena Kagan was Dean of Harvard Law instead). This cursus honorum is a relatively new development; Earl Warren had been Governor of California before his appointment to the Court, and William Rehnquist had been a legal advisor to Barry Goldwater and Assistant Attorney General in the Nixon Administration. This professionalization of the Court has done nothing to depoliticize it; the ritualization and formalization of the norms and customs surrounding SCOTUS have simply reduced any remaining accountability or connection to the broader body politic of the Republic. These connections run more than one way. We’ve already mentioned the Federalist Society, the cornerstone of conservative jurisprudence, which grooms conservative lawyers and law students and helps shape their career, and there’s also truly immense amounts of financial support available to support these relationships from sympathetic funders. But even beyond that narrow partisan lens, justices exist within a tight sphere of patronage. Clerking for the Supreme Court, for example, has become a sure path to power and influence for law students, and it’s handled totally at the discretion of the justices themselves.

One former Roberts clerk described his clerkship simply: “It’s not just a credential—it’s an entire professional universe.” That universe is why firms now pay signing bonuses of up to $450,000 to attract clerks fresh out of One First Street, a practice so entrenched that it has reshaped lateral hiring at the country’s most profitable law firms.

The exclusivity of the system has long been recognized by scholars and commentators, though not always in a positive light. One Columbia Law Review article, for example, noted how Supreme Court clerkships concentrate opportunity in a handful of schools and chambers. The result is a cycle: the same institutions that dominate clerk hiring replicate their influence generation after generation.

“Supreme Court Clerks and Networks of Power”, Adam Feldman (Source)

Justices choose clerks who will support them ideologically and professionally, building networks of influence that can last for decades, given the length of their terms on the bench. Those clerks may go on to serve in private practice–often in firms with business before the Court–or enter the justice system themselves. It’s a system of personal connections and influence, with little pretense given to democratic accountability, one of the many ways in which justices are allowed to operate like aristocratic magnates, rather than magistrates of a democratic republic. These networks of influence run back to the law schools from which they originate, as well. In 2024, a group of Republican judges attempted to use their latitude over clerkship placements to punish Columbia University for student protests against Israel. This pipeline gives law professors immense power as well, given that their recommendations can make or break careers, but it is also leaves them vulnerable. Prominent law professors and litigators often serve as legal analysts, shaping public perception of law and the coverage of court cases, and setting the tone and basis for debate on these topics, usually without discussion of how dependent their own influence is on their ability to get students prestigious clerkships or sway the Supreme Court with their arguments.

It is no surprise that conservative legal powerhouses such as Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld wield extensive influence in Republican politics, but even ostensibly “liberal” legal scholars often write about the Court with a degree of sycophancy and deference that is hard to reconcile with the culture of a democratic society. Men like Noah Feldman, Neil Katyal, and Cass Sunstein have been immensely influential in shaping the judicial policy of the Democratic Party, as well as its professional relationships to the legal intelligentsia, and have built their careers around appeasing and genuflecting to the collective power of the Court, and the broader networks of the elite legal world. This norm often extends to “court watchers” and the culture of legal journalism writ large, as seen with Nina Totenberg’s close friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsberg, or the level of deference regularly granted to his subjects by Benjamin Wittes. Little surprise that Sunstein, in his book published last year about the future of liberalism, is careful to include the jurisprudence of the current Court within the intellectual tradition he wants to uphold.

But you believe that all nine of the Justices are committed to liberalism of the sort that you outlined in your book and are trying to uphold it?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I’m not going to name any names, but there is a conservative judge who did read the first couple of chapters of the book and did say, I agree with all of this.

Wow. I would just say that I find it very hard to believe, especially with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who seem to me to be kind of out-and-out partisan Trump supporters.

This is completely fair to question. Alito is an extremely careful lawyer and a very precise judge. He is clearly taken with a certain view of our culture that is shared by many of Trump’s supporters. But is it possible to find an opinion in which he says, I’m going to go this way because the President is the law, or anything that verges on that? I think that’s very hard to find. Is there anything in his opinions that shows disrespect for freedom of speech or freedom of religion? I think that’s impossible to find. Thomas is an originalist. He’s the most committed originalist on the Court, who believes the Constitution should be understood in accordance with its original meaning. I don’t like that view much, but you can hold that view and be a liberal in the sense of believing in the rule of law, believing in freedom of speech. He does want to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan, but he’s not the only one who thinks that and that doesn’t make him illiberal. [That decision, from 1964, raised the standard for defamation lawsuits in a way that is seen as crucial to press freedom.] So I do agree with you. There are concerning things about political connections that appear, but in terms of the liberal tradition I’m not giving up on Justice Thomas.

“Can Liberalism Be Saved?”, Issac Chotiner (Source)

I should clarify, that I am not accusing anyone here of base corruption, in the sense of a quid pro quo or knowingly lying in order to gain influence (though of course the current Supreme Court has actually legalized that, by and large). But to quote Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The existence of this tangled, incestuous network of professional organizations, relationships, norms, financial obligations, institutions, etc has created a world in which challenging the individual power and influence of the Court and its justices is simply impossible. The Court no longer operates as part of the complex mechanism of checks and balances, resolving disagreements between lower courts and and settling constitutional disputes, it feels entitled to regularly assert its will over the nation as a whole, based on the justices’ own private beliefs and political inclinations. We’ve seen this most blatantly with the so-called ‘Shadow Docket‘, where SCOTUS now regularly intervenes in lower court decisions arbitrarily without providing justification, in the immunity decision from last year, where John Roberts rewrote the law to give sweeping immunity from criminal law to the executive branch, the utter incoherence of this year’s voting cases, in which the Court has regularly contradicted itself in order to blatantly rig the midterm elections for the Republican Party, or even (in a less high-profile example), just straight-up lying about verifiable public facts in a school prayer case from 2023. This corruption was summarized by New York Times OpEd columnist Jamelle Bouie better than I could, and so I urge you to read his thoughts in full:

Typically when we use the word corruption, we are thinking about monetary corruption, bribes and the like. And it should be said there’s some of this. Clarence Thomas in particular is known for taking large sums, large gifts from his wealthy benefactors. Alito has also been the beneficiary of wealthy friends. So there is that kind of corruption as well.

But corruption also has a broader meaning. It can mean the malign use of power, the substitution of the public trust for your own private will, your own private interest. And that is more than anything else what is happening with the Supreme Court. You can see it in many different ways. The Roberts Court is quite fond of simply ignoring the plain text of the Constitution whenever it gets into the way of their particular political and ideological projects.

The Roberts Court wants to do a few things. It wants to gut the Reconstruction Amendments. It wants to aggrandize presidential power. It wants to free corporate speech. It wants to allow the wealthy to interact with the political system in any way they choose. And it wants to pursue the particular partisan interest of the Republican party. And so when the text of the Constitution gets in the way, they changed the text or they ignore it.

“The Supreme Court Is Corrupt. This Is What We Can Do About It”, Jamelle Bouie (Source)

Where does this supreme arrogance come from? Much of it is the simple partisan will-to-power, “we do this because we can”, but I want to return our attention to the idea of “juristocracy”. We’ve talked about it as an actual material power, a network of schools, institutions, and relationships that keeps legal power elevated and isolated, but I think it can also be seen as an idea, one that is so prevalent in our politics now that we rarely even think of it as an ideological statement—the belief that “constitutional law” as a discipline is a type of divination, requiring the intercession of a select priesthood and proper rites, and unfit for the purview of the masses. This obsession with pedigree and “qualifications” has mostly been used a thin screen for racist gatekeeping by the legal intelligentsia and their enablers, but it is the inevitable result of a judicial body that has no constraints or limits beyond what it chooses to accept, and which exists in a symbiotic relationship with a broader professional class with every incentive to maintain their own exclusivity. It’s an attitude that sees SCOTUS not as one branch of appointed civil servants of the Republic, but as a select elite with authority to regulate the people and legislature, a Guardian Council with sweeping and arbitrary authority.

It’s a view that is completely incompatible with a democratic society or government, of course, as we’re seeing now. For all that Roberts may bleat about being “apolitical”, the Court’s decision to essentially rule that multiple laws passed by Congress and unambiguously justified by the Constitution are no longer enforceable because six Supreme Court justices have decided that racism no longer exists is only comprehensible from a worldview of pure judicial supremacy, in which SCOTUS serves as the guardian of national culture and continuity as a sort of supra-legislative body. I think it’s very obvious this is not what anyone intended the constitutional court of appeals to function as. The Constitutions was written by politicians, and ratified publicly. It is intended to be the charter of a self-governing and free people, not a secret code that can only be interpreted by those who have been read into the proper mystery cult. The Constitution belongs to us, more than it does the faculty of Yale Law School.

The grotesque absurdity of this process can be seen most clearly in the ongoing birthright citizenship case, in which the Trump Administration seeks to overturn the plain text of the 14th Amendment in order to strip citizenship from millions of Americans. Court watchers seem convinced that SCOTUS will not support the Administration this time, though we have yet to find out, but regardless, the conservative legal intelligentsia has rapidly constructed an elaborate series of arguments and justifications, arguing in essence that a hundred and fifty years of how democratically-enacted law has functioned should be thrown out because of a reinterpretation of Medieval English Common Law. You have to go back that far because the actual text of the congressional debate when the 14th Amendment was ratified is extraordinarily clear. This is no way to run a country. SCOTUS may or may not agree with this now, but like so many other ideas, now that it has begun circulating within the bloodstream of the constitutional law industrial complex, it will likely prove impossible to extract. Law students are moving up the ladder to clerk and attorney and judge and justice, vetted and approved and indoctrinated by their peers and sponsors and mentors, and this will likely soon become as much of a litmus test as repealing Row v. Wade was, or eviscerating the Voting Rights Act. And like those examples, it can go from unthinkable to conventional wisdom very, very fast.

So what are we going to do about this?

As I said at the beginning of this piece, there are a number of proposals for court reform circulating now. It’s possible there’ll be a wave election and a Democratic supermajority and a trifecta in 2030 and we can actually just resolve this crisis relatively straightforwardly. I’m not optimistic, but hey, you never know. It’s going to depend on how the stupidest people in the country noble and nonpartisan swing voters decide to vote, and your guess is as good as mine. So putting aside the immediate future, we need to refocus how we approach the Supreme Court, as Americans, as liberals, as Democrats. Whether or not we win in the next few years, history is not going to end. As the Hungarian election results last month demonstrated, there’s always another chapter. Going forward, we need to understand that the modern “juristocracy”, this immensely powerful Guardian Council untethered from custom and law, is unacceptable. We need to treat it like it’s unacceptable. We need to treat its enablers as unacceptable, and the institutions and networks that created it. This needs to become consensus; it should be impossible to be a Democratic candidate for office without believing that the Court is a corrupt threat to American democracy, and people who don’t believe that should not be able to shape and influence our judicial policy. This isn’t a battle that can be won overnight, it’s a campaign to shape the contours of public opinion and belief, and as Josh Marshall writes, there’s no clear delineation between building support for court reform and pressuring the existing Court, it’s the same process.

As I wrote last week, I think we’ve gone past the point where the threat of accountability can restrain this Court’s corruption. That might have worked in 2012 or perhaps as late as the late teens. I think that window has closed. But we still shouldn’t see a bright line between the credible threat of reform and a thorough house-cleaning taking place. It is critically important that Democrats be building Court-reforming majorities in 2026 and have it be a major part of legislative action in the next Congress, even if actual reform is basically impossible with a Republican president in place. The threat of accountability shapes behavior. Ideally, that threat would spur members of the Court to curtail their corrupt actions, generating a kind of race to 2029 in which members of the corrupt majority tried to deprive the reform movement of oxygen by making reform less necessary.

Is that likely? Can the problem be solved without changes to the structure, membership and size of the Court? I doubt it. But this is the kind of thing you allow to play out. Have multiple paths to achieving the goal. The point is that the threat of accountability and reform creates incremental steps toward achieving the goal, not only in building consensus and power to enact reform but in curtailing corrupt behavior. It’s not a binary either/or.

“Are Democrats Warming to Reforming the Supreme Court?”, Josh Marshall (Source)

The battle over specific policies of reform will be won or lost in swing districts across the country, and will probably have more to do with gas prices and inflation than anything we do. But we can start the work of tearing down the edifice of the juristocracy at every level, regardless of what happens in November. We can build new pathways of influence and power, and we can work to erode the presumption of authority and deference that has been unquestioned for far too long. We can make the Court into a partisan institution, not just in fact, but in form as well, something that has to, as Steve Vladeck writes, “look over its shoulder”, and exist within the broader democratic system. We can treat these people with the contempt they deserve, and in doing so, destroy the appearance of inevitability and invincibility that underlies their power. Or we can keep ignoring the problem as it festers for another generation.

It’s up to us to decide.

I think Texan singer-songwriter James McMurtry is one of the greatest living lyricists in America. He writes these richly-layered narratives, diving deep into the lives of ordinary people, painting a picture of their story and making you feel them, deep down in your soul. His father, Larry McMurtry, was a celebrated novelist, and James does the same kind of work in a few hundred words that he did in a few hundred pages. There is an empathy in his songs that is really hard to imitate—a willingness to fully embody alien perspectives and to make you, the listener, see things through somebody else’s eyes. “Rachel’s Song“, “Lights of Cheyenne“, “Hurricane Party“, “Just Us Kids“, “Jackie“, “South Texas Lawman“—I could go on for quite a while, and I think they’re all masterpieces. But it’s a different genre of song I want to talk about today, because McMurtry has never been shy about getting political, and he does in the same way that he does everything else, with empathy and poetry and raw bleeding emotion.

But his songs have changed, as he’s gotten older. They still have just as much skill and heart woven into them, they still speak to something primal in the American soul, but listening to his most recent album, The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy, released in 2025, it struck me how different his songs about Trump are from his songs about Bush, and the ways in which that reflects how this country has changed over the last twenty years, and how we’ve all changed together in living through it.

James McMurtry’s most famous political song, and the one that probably did the most to cement his reputation, was “We Can’t Make It Here”, from his 2005 album Childish Things. It’s a primal scream of a song, crackling with righteous fury, a populist ballad that gives voice to the bubbling discontent of early aughts America, the building fury over offshoring and deindustrialization and endless wars and all the indignities of a changing world that seemed to be robbing ordinary Americans of the opportunities and promise that their grandparents had taken for granted. It’s a song about how they stabbed us in the back, they stole something from us. It’s about betrayal, more than anything else, about those bastards who’d left us all behind.

Now I’m stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store
Just like the ones we made before
‘Cept this one came from Singapore
I guess we can’t make it here anymore

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin?
Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I’m in?
Should I hate ’em for having our jobs today?
No, I hate the men sent the jobs away

I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams
All lily white and squeaky clean
They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need
Their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed
Their kids won’t bleed in their damn little war
And we can’t make it here anymore

“We Can’t Make It Here” – James McMurtry

The best way I can describe it is incandescent, you can feel the contempt and fury radiating out from every line and chord, and at a seven minutes and four seconds there’s a lot of it. At multiple points in the song it feels like it’s winding down, only for McMurtry to get so angry about another injustice or inequality that he leaps into another verse. “We Can’t Make It Here” is an epic, it feels like the attempt to define an age and a zeitgeist, and it arguably succeeded. Robert Christgau called it the best song of the 2000s in 2010, and it really sums up a certain type of political mentality, a nonpartisan populist fury that rages against the collapse of the political economy of the 20th century.

“We Can’t Make It Here” draws a line in the sand, between the president and the CEOs on one side, and the ordinary, bewildered people of the small towns and farms they fucked over in their search for power. It feels very reminiscent of Bernie Sanders’ campaigns, though it predates them by a decade. In 2016, in trying to come to terms with Trump’s election, critics turned to McMurtry as a voice of rural America, and he himself echoed some of that sense of being “left behind” by the political establishment.

I drove through at least forty-six states this year. I saw very few Clinton yard signs in my travels. I saw quite a few Trump signs and stickers. … While I am dismayed and disgusted by the outcome of the recent election, I can’t say I’m all that surprised.

If Hillary did anything to actually deserve to lose the election, it was the “deplorables” remark. Did she not see the hypocrisy in that statement? Democrats are supposed to be about inclusion. Whatever we may think of them, those “deplorables” are our fellow Americans.

Want to Understand Trump’s America? Listen to the Songs of James McMurtry, Andy Hermann (Source)

That sense of anger and contempt continued to define McMutry’s political work, which remained a minority of his catalogue, but was a major presence on his 2008 album Just Us Kids, especially the songs “God Bless America” and “Cheney’s Toy“. These are not subtle songs, nor are they coy about their targets–they take aim directly at the Republican Party, the Iraq War, and President Bush, who McMurtry seems to hate so much he simply refuses to ever actually say his name. Even his more historically-grounded, elegiac “Ruins of the Realm“, which reflects on the parallels between modern America and the Roman Empire and the British Raj still focuses heavily on Bush–or “the little cowboy”, as he calls him. The themes are familiar to anyone who remembers Bush-era politics and media; the waste of lives in pointless wars, the callousness of the political class, the pious invocations of religion to justify the unjustifiable, the stupidity of the president, the contrast between the excess and corruption of our consumerist culture and the blood being shed to defend it.

You keep talkin’ that shit like I never heard
Hush little president, don’t say a word
When the rapture comes and the angels sing
God’s gonna buy you a diamond ring

—

You’re the man/show them what you’re made of
You’re no longer daddies boy
You’re the man they’re all afraid of–
But you’re only Cheney’s toy

“God Bless America” and “Cheney’s Toy” – James McMurtry

These are all songs about us and them; the elite in their air-conditioned luxury SUVs, the president in his ivory tower, and the bewildered, betrayed masses who’ve been dragged into complicity with their crimes, left behind in the dying towns of the Rust Belt, or sent to die on the sands of Iraq because of Bush and Cheny’s lies.

McMurtry’s next big political anthem doesn’t sound like that, though. “Remembrance” was released as a free download on his website, just before the 2016 election. It’s not actually available for purchase anywhere, and it’s never appeared on any of his albums. In his notes he said “It’s election time, but I couldn’t get my head around modern politics. Perhaps history holds a lesson or two”, and the song reflects that kind of ambivalence, that lack of the burning moral clarity and furious commitment that defined his earlier work. “Remembrance” is a wistful, melancholy song, about looking back at your life and everything you’ve lived through. It’s about Spain, and the death of Francisco Franco, and the election of Ronald Reagan, and remembering hope and despair and how little things seem to ever change.

Not long since the passing of Franco
The generals are singin’ the blues
“El generalísimo ya está muerto!”
“Who among us dares take him the news?”
And Juan Carlos’ll hold free elections
Democracy’s coming Spain
Perhaps it may prove to our liking
Should the trouble not outweigh the gain

“Remembrance” – James McMurtry

“We Can’t Make It Here” was from the perspective of unemployed ordinary Americans, watching their futures dry up and blow away—and they knew who to blame for it. “I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams/All lily white and squeaky clean”. But “Remembrance” is sung from the view of an expatriate American, playing knockoff rock and roll for tourists in Torremolinos, watching the world go by with a sort of bewildered distance, and kept there by a veil of cocaine and alcohol. Governments rise and fall but it seems to make no difference in the bars and discos of the Spanish coast, and maybe it doesn’t make any difference anywhere else either.

It’s a while since the passing of Franco
And the prices are starting to rise
An old man peruses the menu
Dismay on his face clearly shows
“No subieron los precios con Franco!”
“Porque Franco nos dijo que no”

“Remembrance” – James McMurtry

There’s no real villain in this song, or moral divide between us and them. Reagan and Thatcher and Franco and Brezhnev are mentioned, but so is the old man, reminiscing about how much better things where when the Generalissimo kept everyone in line, and the “housewives are stumping for Reagan/As we butcher Van Halen and Rush.” It’s a haunting, heartbreaking song, even though very little actually happens in it. It questions whether we’ll ever actually learn anything from what we’ve gone through–or if we even really want to–and it seems to embody that liminal moment of lost innocence, right before Trump’s election, when we were all still trying to convince ourselves that the impossible couldn’t happen. The setting helps give it a sense of distance—the topic is too big to think about, too terrifying to complete, and so we talk about history, about the past, about far-off times and places instead of the elephant in the room.

McMurtry’s next album was “The Horses and the Hounds”, released in 2021. The only reference to Trump on it I can remember is in the hilarious “Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call“, where the protagonist complains: “Ain’t nothing but Fox News fiction on/Nobody’s showing the game I’m betting on/How’re they gonna build a wall with no Mexicans anyway?” which I mention simply because it’s such a perfect representation of the way my grandfather used to yell at MSNBC.

Then came the 2024 election, and now James McMutry won’t play “We Can’t Make It Here” anymore.

The song hits the same now as it did then, but McMurtry didn’t play it on the night I saw him perform. When we’d met days earlier for lunch at a little Mexican restaurant in South Austin, he told me over asado de puerco that he doesn’t play “We Can’t Make It Here” anymore because it’s dated. “I don’t sing it now. I don’t believe it now. Now I’m a globalist,” said McMurtry, who wore a ragged button-down, a Meet the Press ball cap, and an elaborate turquoise bracelet on his wiry wrist. 

McMurtry’s stance is that under an “America First” policy and amid calls to bring iPhone production back the U.S., the sentiment of “We Can’t Make It Here” would get co-opted. “These people that want to bring back manufacturing to the States, they don’t want to bring back the good-paying union jobs that gave us the middle class of the fifties. They want to bring back indentured servitude. They’re thinking of another generation. They want to go back to 1890s industrialism,” McMurtry explained. “The only way to do it is to totally wreck the economy, bring it down to where we have to do anything just for something to eat.” 

“James McMurtry Won’t Play His Famous Populist Anthem Anymore”, Scott Ray (Source)

Which brings us to The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy (2025) and “Sons of the Second Sons”, which to me is the defining song of the second Trump administration. “Sons of the Second Sons” isn’t a denunciation of Trump or MAGA, it’s not a furious call to action, an attempt to rally the people against our oppressors. It’s an elegy, a hymn to the idea of America that he used to have faith in that he can’t quite believe in anymore. It’s a song about the children of the Old World, who set out into the unknown to build a new one because there was nothing left for them at home. This is a song about us, not about them, and it suggests that maybe that all the components of our national mythology–a nation of immigrants, of outcasts, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, dedicated to a new birth of freedom and the proposition that all men were created equal–maybe it’s all true, and maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe what makes us who we are is also what makes us so eager to sell off our birthright.

Sons of the second sons
Products of genocide
Polishin’ up our guns
Livin’ in double-wides
Sons of the peasantry
Tellin’ ourselves we’re free
Sons of the pagan serfs
Salt of the fuckin’ Earth
In search of a Caesar

“Sons of the Second Sons” – James McMurtry

Maybe this is who we are. Maybe this is what we want. There is a heartbreaking sense of despair to this song, and to this album, a sense of mourning for a lost ideal and a lost dream, and it’s deeply personal–McMurtry places himself, and the people he identifies with, firmly within the ranks of the “Sons of the Second Sons” he’s singing about. Maybe the problem is us. Maybe we weren’t betrayed or tricked, maybe this is just what we wanted. There’s an idea that I think we were all brought up with, a narrative, a story, that America has struggled to live up to its ideas in the past, but we’ve always come together in the end to do the right thing, to bend the arc of history towards justice.

And for a while, we did okay
Or lookin’ back, it seems that way
Tried to put our bеst foot down
We left tracks in the lunar dust
Did away with the meaner stuff
All could ride at the front of the bus now
Didn’t need no Jim Crow car
And we thought we’d come so far

“Sons of the Second Sons” – James McMurtry

I am writing this on the same day that the Supreme Court has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act.

It is hard to believe in America anymore. I think we can still fight for it–I think we have to, given that this is where we live. But it’s hard to believe in that ineffable sense of imagined community, that we are collectively a nation of people who live by the same laws and ideals. Half the country voted for a senile and murderous rapist, twice, because he promised to punish the other half of the country, and they liked the idea of their neighbors getting hurt. That’s not something we can ignore anymore. And of course, this was always true. Anyone who knows history knows how manufactured our national mythology is, but myths matter. We need stories to help us understand what we want to become. What kind of future can we envision for ourselves now?

The other overtly political song on McMurtry’s new album, “Annie“, is about 9/11, and it’s a fascinating piece of songwriting, both capturing the sense of bewildered confusion and terror at the time, and also looking back on the events with the bitter cynicism of age and distance. He sings about Bush now not with fiery hate, but with wry exhaustion “We’ve all seen worse now, but his name’s still mud/For goin’ down that rabbit hole while Arafat gave blood”. Looking back on all the disasters and pitfalls of the Bush Administration that he once railed against, McMutry now sees it slipping into history and memory, the sharp edges of betrayal dulled by time and forgetfulness. “Now they tell us how he found his feet/Standin’ in the rubble of the towers.”

We’re all going to see that happen with Trump too, of course. You’re going to live long enough to see bloodless discussions of his “colorful but controversial” presidency in textbooks. Trump is “normal” now, and we can’t turn the page back to before that was true. That’s just the nature of time, and history. We live in a country where gutter-racism won the White House, and where an electoral majority was forged by promising to punish the people I love for existing, and that’s not something I’ll forget anytime soon. The politicians aren’t allowed to say that, and neither are the pundits, but art isn’t bound by those rules.

Art doesn’t have to have answers either, which is good, because I don’t think McMurtry has any, and I certainly don’t. Despair isn’t a useful political motivator, and there’s a lot of pressure right now to keep up a good attitude–but just between you and me, it’s hard to avoid. But maybe despair doesn’t have to mean defeat. Maybe we’re the sons of the second sons, the children of outcasts and rebels and slaves, the salt of the fuckin’ earth, and maybe that doesn’t make us special, maybe it just makes us human. Maybe we can build something new on the other side of the stark realization.

I don’t know. But we’re going to find out together.

TITLE: The Folded Sky

AUTHOR: Elizabeth Bear

SERIES: White Space

PUBLISHER: Saga Press

DATE: 2025

Is this the most recent book I’ve reviewed on here? I think it might be—my choices usually tend to be volumes that I’ve ruminated on for years, books that I read as a child that I couldn’t stop thinking about, or classics that reshaped my worldview, or that I just thought were really interesting. Often I read a book, like it quite a lot, but don’t have much of anything to say about it. But Elizabeth Bear’s The Folded Sky caught my imagination and wouldn’t let go more-or-less instantaneously upon its release last June. Set on the fringes of utopia, in an unimaginably distant future where people are still recognizably human in all our glories and foibles, The Folded Sky asks us to think about entropy and order, and what responsibility we have to civilization and to ourselves. It’s about history, and and how we write it, and the unbearable weight of the past, and our struggle to forge a future, and what it means to be a mother and a wife and child, and how to find meaning in a Universe that seems hostile to the very concept of permanence. It’s also about being trapped on a space station orbiting a dying star with a murderer.

BACKGROUND:

Dr. Sunya Song is an archinformist; a archeologist of information, sent to decode and catalogue a newly-discovered sentient artificial megastructure on the edge of the Milky Way. It could be the biggest opportunity of her career, and one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in centuries, and Dr. Song is determined to be the one to crack the code. Unfortunately, that’s not all she’s dealing with right now. Her alien wife has invited herself along for the trip, her two teenage children are acting like teenagers, her cats don’t enjoy space travel and blame her, fanatical xenophobic pirates have blockaded the star system and are trying to kill them all, there’s a flesh-eating amoeba loose on the space station, office politics are becoming positively poisonous, one of the scientists is probably a murderer, and Sunya’s ex-girlfriend and chief academic rival has “just happened” to choose this project to work on to, and followed her across the known Universe to become trapped on a makeshift research station with a dozen other sentients and rapidly dwindling supplies. Oh, and did I mention the star is about to explode? Dr. Sunya Song has a lot going on right now, and she’s really not in the mood.

WHAT I LIKED:

1. The immediate point of comparison for these books, at least to me, is Ian Banks’ Culture novels, a series set in the Far Future about a post-scarcity utopian commonwealth consisting of humans, aliens, and Artificial Intelligences living in a shared civilization. Like the Culture, the Synarche is an interstellar civilization containing humans, aliens, and Artificial Intelligences and dedicated to the pursuit of individual potential and shared success. Also like the Culture, having solved all of the problems that we would recognize has not actually created a totally perfect world, but neither is it a dystopian “reveal” of the secret evil underlying the facade of utopia. Instead, everyone seems quite human, whether or not they actually are, if that makes sense. Utopia is an interesting choice of setting, because it seems to preclude any kind of interesting story, but what I think both Banks and Bear realize is that by solving many of the more prosaic or banal problems that we face in terms of economics or politics, you clear the way for deeper, more involved explorations of ideas and characters. The Folded Sky isn’t about the impossibility of utopia, or the falsity of its values, but it is about the difficulty of living up to them. It’s about a society composed of many different kinds of people, all of whom have faults and flaws and frustrations, and the value there is in finding a way to live with them, whether they’re a giant octopus who works as a scientific administrator, the sentient computer of a starship, or a “clade” of five human bodies with a single shared mind. In the same way that Banks’ novels other followed the adventures of “Special Circumstances”, the Culture’s covert ops arm that carries out the dirty work of maintaining their perfect society, Bear is interested in what it means to know you’re supposed to be better than something, but be unable to make yourself believe that.

2. The most interesting aspect of this theme in the White Space novels is that of “rightminding”, the term characters use for a wide array of neurological interventions and treatments that are designed to allow you to directly manipulate and access your own emotions, reactions, memories, and other subconscious processes, giving you the ability to override your instincts.

A more predatory syster might need rightminding to control their urge to eat their coworkers. And we need rightminding to prevent our desire for a narrative from spawning endless conspiracy theories and justifications for things we were going to do anyways. The interventions that make use halfway decent galactic citizens and caretakers–rather than aggressively hierarchical apes–are devoted as much as anything to controlling that instinctual need.

Thus do we all manage to coexist with other species and even work productively with them. Thus does the Synarche persist and generally manage to meet the diverse needs of its diverse Synizens.

Syncretically. And synthetically.

The Folded Sky, Elizabeth Bear, pg. 65

I really admire Bear for being willing to go there, to touch the third rail of transhumanism, and to directly tackle a deeply uncomfortable and nuanced topic without apology. The whole idea, of rewiring the human brain directly, of overriding our instincts and thoughts, feels like something out of Brave New World, and the cheerful Orwellianism of “rightminding” does nothing to dissuade you from that initial impression. We even get a diegetic version of this critique, with the pirate “Freeporters”, who see it as a form of mind control. But Folded Sky makes you reconsider that bioessentialist assumption; why shouldn’t we rebuild the human mind, just as we rebuild our bodies and our environments? Very little that is worthwhile about civilization is “natural”, after all. Traditional gender roles have their roots in biological and material realities, but that is no reason to chain people to the weight of the past. As Shulamith Firestone wrote in 1970, “We can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on the grounds of its origin in Nature”, and we can see this same battle playing out now in the current culture wars over the limits of gender and sexuality. This theme of potential and choice triumphing over naturalistic parochialism is paramount here, and we also see it with Salvie, Sunya’s wife, who left the ordered, communal four-gendered hive structure of her homeworld because she wanted something different from her life. The Folded Sky isn’t a work of didactic feminist theory, but it makes a radical attempt at expanding the limits of our imagination that I can only admire.

3. The protagonist of The Folded Sky is an archinformist, a profession that Bear seems to have made up, but that nevertheless is quite familiar to me. Dr. Sunya Song works to recover and maintain information, to restore records, to find connections where they didn’t exist, and rebuild data that has been lost. It’s a battle that is, at its core, completely futile, and yet central to what makes human (or Synarche) civilization function.

Information doesn’t want to be free.

Information wants to vanish without a trace. It wants to slurp down the drain like soapy water planetside, a slick Coriolis whirl and then–gone. Vamoosed. Kaput.

Books crumble, digital media degrade. Even holographic storage crystals grow lossy over time. As the universe expands, every cubic meter holds a little less information than it did the instant before.

The sun’s rim dips. The stars rush out. At one stride comes the dark.

Entropy requires no maintenance. Order and intelligibility do. Sentient life–all life–is just organized information. Disorganized information is the buzz of static. Decay to the signal increases with distance, with time (which is just another form of distance), and with interference.

I was out here putting up with Dakhira because fighting that degradation is my calling. I existed to insert a little negentropy into the system and keep the information alive to edify for one more day.

The Folded Sky, Elizabeth Bear, pg. 13

It’s very existentialist, while still being quite practical. My own training is as a historian and an archivist, and so I recognize these conundrums very well. There isn’t a good solution for permanently maintaining “information of enduring value”, which is why a lot of archivists have started using that terminology in place of “permanent value”. Part of being the steward of an archive is accepting that future stewards will have different standards than you do, that conditions will change, that decisions will have to be made. The Folded Sky is a paean to the world of information management and preservation, that appreciates how fundamental it is to civilization, while also understanding the practical limitations and realities, and I appreciate that. Entropy wins all battles in the end, but that’s no reason not to keep fighting. “Nothing has intrinsic value, but everything has value to someone or something, and nihilism is lazy. That’s what I’m saying.” (Sky, pg. 250).

4. There are various major plots going on in this book, including the need to solve a murder, escape a pirate blockade, and make contact with several new alien species, but the thematic spine of the novel is Sunya Song’s efforts at self-actualization and self-confidence, both in her career and her family life. At its heart, it’s a domestic drama, driven by a surprisingly simple and effective fear: What if my kids don’t want me anymore? Sunya’s teenage children are just getting to the point where they’re starting to break loose from the structure and constraints of the family, and for her, so much of the drama and the pathos of the book is trying to balance her need to support that with the genuine hurt she feels when her daughter Luna ignores or fights her. “My job, I reminded myself sternly, was to get us through the next six to eight years alive, in such a manner that she didn’t hate me afterward, and was ready to launch on the trajectory on her choice.” (Sky, pg. 165). It’s almost a Bildungsroman in reverse, focusing not on the adolescent struggling to establish her own identity, but on the adult, who knows she has to let her. Rightminding, in this context, adds to the frustration; you can’t began neurological interventions until someone is in their mid-twenties, and so the contrast between Sunya’s ability to directly interrogate her own emotions and instincts and Luna’s adolescent angst is simply magnified. Being the adult in the relationship, the responsible one who is able to regulate her emotions, isn’t always easy, and there’s a painful rawness to a lot of the conflict in here that isn’t elided by how simple or commonplace it is. Plus, it’s always funny to see this proven true once again.

5. I think part of why I was so drawn to this book is that Sunya Song is a character I felt a lot of connection with. As I said above, my actual training and education is in history and archiving, two fields that deeply overlap with being an “archinformist”, and I share the fascination with data and a knowledge of its limitations. Song is deeply, deeply anxious and insecure, about her career, about her relationships, about her place in society and in her profession, all of which she worries she’s ruined—a recurring theme is her feeling like she’s missed all the opportunities, that she’s no longer “the Hot New Thing”, and just a has-been before even getting her feet out from under her. Needless to say, these are all concerns and themes that resonate with me.

6. This next point is a SPOILER, so skip it if that matters to you, but it’s too good not to share. A major aspect of this book is about Sunya’s relationship with Dr. Vickee DeVine, her ex-girlfriend from graduate school and academic rival, and throughout the story, Sunya has to keep reminding herself, over and over again, to be rational and adult and serious about this; just because she has a lot of hangups about their relationship doesn’t mean Vickee does, just because she has spent years dealing with the trauma and resentment from their breakup and the way Vickee tried to sabotage her career doesn’t mean Vickee has spent any time in the last decade thinking about her, just because she feels like the universe is conspiring against her doesn’t mean it actually is, etc, etc. Except, of course, she’s totally right actually, Vickee is a narcissist and a psychopath and an attempted murderer who has never forgiven Sunya for being a better scholar than her. It’s a great example of the limitations of rightminding; paranoia is actually completely reasonable if someone really is out to get you.

7. In the introduction to science fiction writer David Brin’s first novel, Sundiver (1980), he offers his advice to aspiring writers, which is that your first book should always be a murder mystery. (Sundiver is a murder mystery set on a spaceship exploring the sun). This gives you a basic structure and framework to build your story around, he argues, and lets you figure out your characters and world in a controlled environment. The Folded Sky isn’t Bear’s novel, but I think the principle holds. There is a lot going on in this book, including multiple important subplots I haven’t even touched on, and the really strong superstructure of the plot helps keep it from feeling overwhelming or incoherent. The basic idea of “trapped on a space station at the edge of the Galaxy with a murderer” is really strong and attention-grabbing, and gives you time and space to integrate everything else.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:

1. This isn’t a criticism, per se, but I should clarify that The Folded Sky is technically part of a trilogy, alongside Ancestral Night (2019) and Machine (2020), all of which are loosely linked together by plot, but have mostly different characters. I’m limiting this to Folded Sky because it was my favorite of the three, and I didn’t want to lose focus, but they’re all quite good, I just want to note that context so people aren’t surprised, either by the connections or by the lack of them. You can read the books out of order, (I certainly did!) though it will mean having been spoiled on some of what happens in Ancestral Night.

2. I said that The Folded Sky did a good job of integrating all its different subplots and characters and revelations, and it does, but I am very curious if Bear is going to write more books in this series. Dr. Sunya Song’s story seems to be done, but I’m really fascinated by this world, and some of the events in here seem like they’d have ramifications that I’d love to see explored elsewhere.

WILL YOU LIKE IT:

Do you like space opera? Do you like science fiction? The Folded Sky is one of those books that doesn’t exactly break any of the rules of its genre, but absolutely exemplifies them, telling a deeply heartfelt story about finding meaning in your life and your work and family in a universe that seems totally inimical to human (and alien) life. It’s about the futility of pushing entropy back uphill, and why we all do it anyways, every day when we get out of bed and try and create something better than we found it. It’s fun, it’s action-packed, it’s exciting, and it’s beautiful, and it makes you care about the world and these characters instantly. It makes you think, in the way good science fiction always does, while also giving you plenty of fun space battles and cool pseudo-scientific babble, in the way good science fiction always does. It’s a must-read for people who already love this genre, and if you’re looking to jump in for the first time, you could do a lot worse.

Today we are once again going to talk about the Honor Harrington series, and once again, I’m going to complain about it. I’m worried this might give readers the impression that I dislike this series, which is truly not the case. David Weber’s Honorverse might genuinely be one of my all-time favorite series, and it’s certainly one of the most influential in terms of my own development as a reader and writer of science fiction. But the problem is, what Weber does right is often not very interesting to talk about—he is a very skilled writer of space battles, of compelling political melodrama, and of simple but memorable character dynamics–while what he does wrong often fascinates me. The politics of Honor Harrington is yet another case of this, though perhaps not in the way you expect. Weber is something of a libertarian (specifically the kind of libertarian who goes so far around he becomes a monarchist, which is oddly common among science fiction writers), and the politics of his books are often blatantly didactic in how they approach and frame the issues. This can be frustrating, but it is the prerogative of a writer to shape their world how they wish.

But what I cannot get over is the Watsonian explanations and description of how the Star Kingdom of Manticore is supposed to function, which despite being well-written and explained at length, generally make absolutely no sense at all. This failure of political storytelling is interesting to me, not as something to make fun of or attack, but because I think it illustrates some common pitfalls of writing and worldbuilding, and the ways in which the author sometimes is unable or unwilling to confront the implications of their own creations.

Let’s dive in.

The Star Kingdom of Manticore is set up, essentially, as Great Britain in space, which is not a coincidence, because the original conceit of the Honor Harrington series was that it was going to be Horatio Hornblower in space. That’s why the fight a People’s Republic of Haven whose capital is Nouveau Paris, led by a Committee of Public Safety run by Rob S. Pierre. And so, in Manticore, we find a naval and commercial power, much smaller than its opponents but with an impregnable strategic position and economic advantage, ruled by a Parliament, consisting of a House of Lords and a House of Commons, and reigned over by Queen Elizabath II of the House of Winton. However, as is so often the case, the more we dig into the actual details, the more confusing this becomes.

We get a detailed history of how Manticore’s government developed the way it did, which I will summarize briefly. Originally the colony was run as a shareholder venture, with Roger Winton as Chairman of the Board. But when the colony decided to open itself up to immigrants, desperately needed after a virulent plague, the original shareholders decided to consolidate power for themselves by transforming their shares into landgrants, and converting the star system into a hereditary aristocracy, ruled by King Roger I. We are told that, originally, the Lords hoped to monopolize power in the new system for themselves, but that they didn’t anticipate the monarchy allying with the Commons to “geld” the aristocracy. The result, as of “modern” times, is generally presented as a constitutional monarchy along the lines of modern Great Britain, in terms of structure and culture–except with a more active and involved Queen. The Star Kingdom has a free press, contested elections, vigorous political debate, a fiercely innovative and competitive capitalist economy, etc, etc. A frequent complaint from characters is that outsiders often assume that because the Star Kingdom is a “monarchy” and Haven is a “republic”, the latter must be a free country.

“Hell, Alan, half the newsies in the Solarian League are already mouthpieces for the Peeps! Pierre’s official line on domestic policy is much more palatable to the Solly establishment than a monarchy is. Never mind that we’ve got a participating democracy, as well, and the Peeps don’t……..They’re a ‘republic’ and we’re a ‘kingdom’, and any good oatmeal-brained Solly ideologue knows ‘republics’ are good guys and ‘kingdoms’ are bad guys!”

Echoes of Honor, David Weber, pg. 16

All well and good. The problem, however, is that if you actually dig into the text of the books themselves, this becomes increasingly more complicated. And perhaps it would be better to say—less complicated.

The position of the monarchy is notably confusing. Despite persistent claims to it being a powerful, active part of the Manticorian constitutional settlement, the actual extant of the Queen’s ability to dictate policy is never clear. When our heroes are in charge of the Star Kingdom, we see Queen Elizabeth II setting the agenda and running the government directly, but in Ashes of Victory (2000) and War of Honor (2003), when the opposition High Ridge government takes over, we see them conducting war, diplomacy, and domestic policy directly in opposition to the wishes of the monarchy, without it seeming to have much recourse. We’re told elsewhere that the Crown has the customary right to appoint the Prime Minister, but at the end of War of Honor, when Elizabeth II rejects an attempt by High Ridge to form a government of national unity, it is presented as a shocking breach of precedent, and one only possible because she knows that this is a pro forma request that will fail to achieve a majority. Even earlier in the series, in Field of Dishonor (1994), when Duke Cromarty’s Centrist/Crown Loyalist coalition still controls Parliament, the refusal of the House of Lords to ratify a formal declaration of war against the People’s Republic is an insurmountable obstacle, despite the support of the Crown and the House of Commons. In practice, the locus of power seems to be located in Parliament, and more specifically, in the Lords.

Now, the structure of the Manticorian parliament is a little bit controversial, because David Weber changed his mind about how he wanted it to function over the course of the series, and had to make some retcons.

When I first created the Star Kingdom’s political structure, I had envisioned the framers of its Constitution as kinder, gentler, more enlightened souls than they turned out to be once I got into actually writing them. In fact, they were much more interested in maintaining their monopoly on political power than I had initially envisioned, and I decided that they would have deliberately written the Constitution to give themselves and their descendants (i.e., the House of Lords) control of the premiership.

Ashes of Victory, David Weber, pg. 646

This sort of minor discrepancy is inevitable when writing a series of a dozen books over the course of a decade, but as the plot of the Honorverse goes from centering on a heroic starship captain to being about the ruling elite of the Star Kingdom, it becomes impossible to ignore the ramifications of this choice—especially when we get to War of Honor, in which much of the plot revolves around the fact that the House of Lords in the Star Kingdom also controls the Power of the Purse, and in fact has the power to pass budgets over the objection of the House of Commons.

Now, I think we need to stop and unpack this for a moment, because what we’ve just established here is a level of aristocratic control in the Star Kingdom that has no parallel in any “constitutional” monarchy. Manticore is, as I have said, persistently depicted as a sort of space-Britain, but one of the oldest traditions of English parliamentary government is the control of taxation and budgetary laws, going all the way back to 1376 and the emergence of the House of Commons as an independent chamber. It is, I think, arguably what makes parliamentary government what it is, rather than just rule by aristocratic oligarchy. This is a far more absolute form of government than the United Kingdom today, or the Georgian Great Britain of the 1790s-1810s. It’s even more exclusive than the constitution of the German Empire (1871-1918); hardly recognized as any kind of liberal state, but one that still vested the power of the purse in the Reichstag, elected by universal manhood suffrage. For that matter, even the Meiji Constitution of Imperial Japan (1889-1947) gave the House of Representatives the power to block legislation by the House of Peers. Unilateral power of the premiership and the purse amounts to total control over all facets of government–as we see in the series. Despite claims of sweeping monarchical reserve powers, Queen Elizabeth II is not able to compel the government to make peace or declare war or levy taxes, except as their pleasure. In fact, the actual constitutional mechanism used by King George V and Prime Minister Asquith to pass the Parliament Act 1911 and break the power of the House of Lords in Britain is explicitly mentioned as being constitutionally banned in Manticore–the Crown is strictly limited in how many new peers to create at any one time.

The only way I think you could make this work is by establishing that customary law requires any Prime Minister to maintain a majority in the House of Commons, which is how a lot of these systems ended up developing over time, regardless of the letter of the law. But that doesn’t seem to be the case? The High Ridge government certainly didn’t need one to function, and even critics of the Manticorian constitutional settlement describe the purpose of the Lords as “placing substantial political power in the hands of a legislative chamber which can be……..insulated from the political and ideological hysteria du jour.” (War of Honor, pg. 37) They mean taxing rich people.

As a side note, the actual electorate that votes for the House of Commons is questionable as well. We’re told that Manticore has universal suffrage, as long as you pay more in taxes than you receive in government benefits. In essence, it’s an income/property requirement, of the kind that Britain slowly abolished over the course of the 19th century, with the Reform Act 1832, the Reform Act 1867, the Representation of the People Act 1884, and the Representation of the People Act 1918. What this means in practice is hard to say without access to numbers: in the United Kingdom after the 1884 Act, approximately 60% of the male population had the right to vote, in Imperial Japan the electorate was originally limited to 1.1% of the adult males in the Empire. The implications of this are mostly avoided by Weber implying it’s irrelevant because Manticore is so unfathomably wealthy, but keep it in mind. That said, the House of Commons simply doesn’t seem to have enough actual power for this to matter.

Now, there’s no reason you can’t write a story about an aristocratic country, especially not when the focus of the politics plots you want to write about are melodramatic personality clashes within a system in which personal prestige and connections determines the shape of the government and the direction of policy more than the ideology of parties. Weber is good at that kind of writing, and it’s not a bad description of the politics of Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, even if in Georgian Britain the ruling elite included not just the titled aristocracy, but the larger masses of the gentry as well.

To speak of political parties is perhaps misleading. The old division into Whigs and Tories has been blurred by the split of the Whigs; and the new division into Conservatives and Liberals, which gave the English party system its present form, was yet to come. Instead of parties there were cliques and coteries–Mr. Pitt’s friends, Mr. Fox’s friends, Mr. Addington’s friends (a circle eventually reduced solely to George III), the prince of Wales’ friends, and so forth.

The Age of Napoleon. J. Christopher Herold, pg. 258

The other great modern “Napoleonic Wars in Space” series, the Republic of Cinnabar Navy by David Drake, leans into this much more heavily. Cinnabar is an outright merchant oligarchy, ruled over by the murderous great families who shamelessly compete with each other for influence and make no pretense of democracy beyond a rough sense of obligation to the commonwealth. The RCN books are not anywhere near as good as the Honor Harrington books, for the record, but I have no trouble believing in the government and society they present, because Drake understands the implications of what he’s presenting. David Weber……clearly doesn’t. Despite the text being quite indisputably clear as to the nature of the Star Kingdom’s government, he still presents it consistently with a recognizably modern (and noticeably American) political culture and society. Throughout the entire series, people talk about the House of Commons as if it’s an equal partner in government. It is not. They talk about elections as though they are of vital important. They are, quite indubitably, not. They talk about the values and beliefs of an open, meritocratic society that we are expected to understand emerged organically under the political dominion of a insulated hereditary aristocracy. But why? People, generally speaking, believe in the values of their society. It is very weird that everybody in the Star Kingdom of Manticore seems to believe that they live in a liberal, democratic constitutional monarchy when those purported beliefs appear to have no impact on the actual form of government. It is these inconsistencies that frustrate me so much. Weber is a very talented writer and worldbuilder, and very good at drawing up deep, historically-rooted explanations and justifications for his plots. Which is why the fact that Manticore makes less and less sense the more you think about it drives me so crazy.

Not to get all historically materialist about this, but I do not believe that a society ruled outright by an aristocratic caste untrammeled by democratic accountability for five centuries would result in a system with a free press, open elections, meritocratic civil service and military promotion, hyper-innovative capitalist economy, rampant social mobility, and massively wealthy non-aristocratic capitalist class, and a recognizably Anglo-American political culture. At the very least, I think you would see a degree of political and social conflict within this society that is simply non-apparent. Where are the Charterites? Where is the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands? Where is the People’s Budget? The actual history of these limited constitutional monarchies in modern times tends, at best, to include frequent social upheaval and unrest, something that is entirely missing from the Manticorian political spectrum. The role of riots and the way in the the public opinion of “the street” can affect aristocratic politics is a major plot point in Drake’s RCN series, but is entirely absent from the Honorverse, or at least from Manticore. In Weber’s political taxonomy, the Centrists and Crown Loyalists are the Good Guys, supporting a firm foreign policy and sensible, limited fiscals, the Conservatives are reactionary aristocratic isolationists, and the Liberals are upper-crust dilettantes obsessed with pacifism and social uplift. There isn’t any populist or mass politics to be found. On one hand, this makes sense. Manticore is a “modern” country, existing several thousand years from now. There isn’t really a proletariat or a peasantry, presumably. But that just makes the total anachronism of the government even more noticeable.

Of course, there’s a reason for that. Like so much other speculative fiction, Weber is more interesting in talking about his own time period than anything else.

Many people initially insisted that the People’s Republic of Haven was the Soviet Union. Then when I introduced Rob S. Pierre and the Committee of Public Safety, everyone said — “Aha! It was really Revolutionary France, all long!” Except, of course, for the people who thought that I’d made a sudden deliberate change in the paradigm I was using for the novels.

Actually, I’d done no such thing. From the very outset, the Republic of Haven was more an example of the United States of America after a couple of centuries of deficit spending by politicians who had cut an unscrupulous deal with the managers of a massive welfare state in return for permanent, hereditary political power for themselves and their heirs.

David Weber, Interview (Source)

This is fine for what it is, though I obviously think the political views are silly at best. But the desire for Manticore and Haven to provide a platform for contemporary political and social commentary simply does not jibe with much of the actual worldbuilding, and that delta gets larger and larger over time as the series expands in size and scope. In early books, like On Basilisk Station (1992), the Star Kingdom’s aristocracy is as much an obstacle to our protagonist as the Havenites. By the latter arcs of the series, all of these irregularities and complexities have been sanded away. By the time they’re fighting the Solarian League, from Mission of Honor (2010) onward, you have the genuinely kind of bizarre situation where the Star Kingdom is leading a campaign to reform the bureaucratic oligarchy of Earth for not being answerable to the people, with nobody involved ever seeming to remember that their government isn’t democratic either. That’s not my commentary, that’s what you write in the Constitution, David. It is wild how often this gets treated as a straw man argument, or some ridiculous accusation, when it is just very clearly the text of the books. This absurdity reaches its zenith in To End in Fire (2021), the final (?) book in the series.

“But Du Havel’s right: in the absence of something like that, the natural pattern is for major political parties to come in and out of power–swap power, you can call it–almost like a metronome. A sixty percent majority is considered a landslide, and more than that is extremely rare. More than two thirds is almost unheard of. The pattern can be frozen for a bit, usually by a war or some other major crisis, but once the crisis is over, the balance gets restored. In a lot of ways, it’s how democratic government breathes”…………………..”Cathy, face it,” Moseki said. “Whether you like it or not, sooner or later the electorate of the Star Empire’s going to decide they’ve had enough of the current government, especially since peacetime conditions seem at hand. And when that happens, there’s only one realistic alternative, given the implosion of both the Progressives and the Conservatives. That’s us–the Liberal Party.”

To End in Fire, Eric Flint & David Weber, pgs. 471-472

So, first of all, Cathy Montaigne isn’t a member of the House of Lords, and can’t be Prime Minister, which nobody at all ever mentions in this multi-page discussion of how she’ll inevitably become Prime Minister someday. This annoys me because Cathy Montaigne renouncing her noble title to run for a seat in the House of Commons was a major plot point a few books ago. I suspect the issue there is that Eric Flint wrote that section of the book and forgot about that detail of Manticorian constitutional law. But more broadly, while this anlysis is broadly true of democratic societies, Manticore is not a democratic society. It just isn’t! The electorate doesn’t have a say in the formation of the government. That’s the whole point! It also demonstrably doesn’t seem to be true, the Cromarty Government that governed Manticore up until Ashes of Victory had lasted for more than thirty years. The whole scene just represents a profound failure to understand the setting that they’d created.

Now, longtime readers of Honor Harrington are no doubt gnashing their teeth and howling with rage right now because—yes, it is true, the end of War of Honor involves a political compromise where the Power of the Purse is transferred to the House of Commons. But to me, that just raises more questions. First of all, because this is a titanic political shift that is treated as a relatively minor adjustment to the balance of powers. Second of all, because the result is to create a new political settlement where the Lords controls the premiership and the Commons controls the purse, balancing each other out in perpetuity. Except, in parliamentary systems, “ability to form a government” and “ability to pass a budget” are almost always treated as synonymous. Failure of a budget is usually the equivalent of a no confidence vote, and often triggers a general election. So it seems to me that Manticore is embarking on an experiment doomed to end in gridlock and mass destabilization of the body politic, especially given the mass annexations that created the Star Empire of Manticore, and the increase in population by several orders of magnitude. The best case scenario here seems to be a direct confrontation between Houses of Parliament à la 1911, and it is that total reformation of the constitutional settlement that Montaigne should be preparing for. But Weber doesn’t approve of mass politics, so it can’t exist in his libertarian monarchist utopia.

So now that I’ve spent 3,500 words complaining about the implications of political background details in a space opera series, let us ask ourselves: What does any of this matter? And I mean, the short answer is, it doesn’t really, in the grand scheme of things. But there is a reason I’m talking about it, because I think the topic presents a really interesting case study in how your assumptions as an author can undermine your story. Weber is a very talented writer, as I’ve said, and he’s very good at compiling mountains of historical details that add verisimilitude to the picture of the world he’s weaving. But all of those details have implications and conclusions, and the refusal to accept those can end up creating a totally incoherent whole, where you’ve designed an aristocratic oligarchy that would make the Most Serene Republic of Venice blush, and yet is inhabited by people with the worldview of contemporary Americans.

That’s not the worst sin a writer can commit, especially if you can still deliver an entertaining story. But as your magnum opus is growing longer and longer and more and more complex and overarching in its plot—well, it’s something to keep in mind.

It starts with an air raid siren, screaming in the dark. Light emerges fitfully, illuminating the shadowy streets of Tokyo as a boy wakes in the night, and watches fire rain down from above. For what is almost certainly the final film of Hayao Miyazaki, it feels like a thematic circle is being fully drawn. Born in 1941, in the shadow of the apocalyptic war that engulfed the Empire of Japan, Miyazaki’s movies are almost all suffused with that aura of mingled horror and fascination, but rarely has it felt so vivid and raw. We are done with metaphors, done with exploring ideas through allegory and illusion, we are returning to the scene of the crime in a movie that seems almost autobiographical in how it depicts the trauma of wartime Japan, and the confusion of growing up on the tipping point between worlds. Or are we?

Because while The Boy and the Heron begins as one of Miyazaki’s most straightforward, unambiguous films, it quickly takes a left turn into surrealism, or perhaps magical realism, as Mahito plunges deep into a mystical Tower, ruled by his great-granduncle that contains an entire world, or perhaps bridges many worlds, or perhaps is a world of its own. It’s hard to say, and it’s not clear that we’re supposed to understand, as the film easily skips and hops between vivid realism, absurd fantasy, and awe-inspiring grandeur. Miyazaki is one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers, but he’s rarely subtle, and The Boy and the Heron isn’t exactly hiding its themes. But there is an inscrutability to it that we’ve rarely seen, a willingness to ignore the audience entirely in favor of a singular vision.

There’s a lot going on here.

The movie begins in 1944, as Tokyo is being firebombed, and a young boy named Mahito Maki loses his mother when the hospital she’s staying in is destroyed. A year later, he and his father Shoichi relocate to the countryside, where his father is marrying Natsuko, his late wife’s sister, much of Mahito’s smothered fury. (Side note, but is sororate marriage a Japanese custom?) The autobiographical parallels here are imperfect, but impossible to miss. Miyazaki was three years old when the Pacific War ended, not fifteen, and his mother did not die in the war–but she was repeatedly hospitalized, and Miyazaki has talked about the bombings being his earliest memories. Even more unmistakable is Shoichi, a brash, hard-charging businessman who runs a factory making fighter planes, just as Miyazaki’s father did. “Aren’t they beautiful?” enthuses Shoichi, showing his son the canopies of Mitsubishi A6M Zeros, stored temporarily on the grounds of the estate due to railroad delays, and again it feels like the layers of metaphor and theme that Miyazaki has been exploring for decades have been suddenly blasted away to reveal the bedrock of core memories.

Anyone who has watched the films of Hayao Miyazaki can, I think, identify the contradiction at their core; the love of flying machines, the fascination with the sleek beauty of the tools of mechanized warfare, and the horror at what they do, and I don’t think I’m extrapolating too much to connect this to his childhood, and his early memories of watching the beautiful machines his father built rain death on his country from above. The character of Shoichi seems inspired by Katsuji Miyazaki in other ways, a wealthy businessman who had managed to avoid military service, arrogant and proud of his accomplishments, obsessed with his career and his status. Hayao always said he’d had a difficult relationship with his father, and Shoichi clearly has little understanding of what drives Mahito or motivates him, but he also clearly loves him deeply, if clumsily. To paraphrase Tolkien, there may not be allegory here, but there is applicability.

It’s impossible not to compare The Boy and the Heron to Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away, another movie about a child journeying into a fantastical spirit world to rescue their parents, but whereas the 2001 movie wastes little time in whisking us away to the bathhouse of the spirits, Heron lingers in wartime Japan for thirty or forty minutes. It’s a vivid and grim picture, presented unselfconsciously, of the reality of the waning months of the Empire in all their contradictions, viewed from the eyes of a terrified little boy trying to be brave: food rationing and tobacco shortages, the streets empty of all but the very old and very young, patriotic slogans plastered on the flimsy wooden walls of the cities, the schools emptied of children for agricultural volunteer work, ox-carts hauling fighter planes to the front lines, women in kimonos alongside men in suits and military outfits–a society in crisis and transition. There is a matter-of-factness to this that makes it unforgettable, a verisimilitude in the way tiny details are captured and drawn. Studio Ghibli has always been known for the vivid realism of how they depict everyday life, and how the contrasts with the fantastic worlds they populate, and that’s more true than ever before here. Natsuko’s estate contains a vast traditional Japanese mansion, but the family itself resides in a small, Western-style house constructed later. A fitting metaphor for the contradictions of post-Meiji Japan, but also something that strikes me as the kind of detail that might have been true, and the sort of social storytelling that needs no explanation to illuminate the world.

The emotional storytelling is just as astute, and just as subtle. There is little dialogue in the first act of the movie, and a great deal of silence. We recognize what the characters are thinking and saying from hints, and allusions, and context clues, and it all feels painfully real, a portrait of an unhappy, imperfect family amidst disaster, trying to live up to their ideals. Mahito is still traumatized from the death of his mother, desperately trying to live up to the martial values of his society that he clearly can’t reach, Shoichi buries himself in work, and seems unable to understand what any of his loved ones’ really care or think about, Natsuko wants to be a mother to Mahito, and is terrified she won’t be able to protect her sister’s son, and that he’ll reject her. Presiding over this tableau is the Tower, a haunted monumental folly built by Mahito’s great-granduncle, sealed away after his disappearance, and the grey heron that haunts the grounds, and steadily taunts and mocks Mahito, trying to draw him into the world of magic and mystery. The normality of the real world unwinds slowly, as we begin to catch glimpses of a deeper truth, but Mahito never seems surprised by it. To a child, the whole world is strange and unknowable, what’s a talking heron added to death-machines that burn you alive from the sky, and a new woman declaring herself your mother, and a school filled with cruel children you’ve never met with expectations you can’t meet?

Inevitably, Mahito is drawn inside the Tower, in search of Natsuko, who has vanished, and finds himself in a world of magic and spirits, populated by the dead, and giant talking birds, and younger versions of people he has met before–all ruled over by the shadowy figure of his great-granduncle, the Tower Master. Most Miyazaki films have relatively simply thematic cores–I would sum it up as “pacifism, environmentalism, feminism”–even if usually presented in a deeply ambiguous, nuanced manner, but Heron feels even simpler in some ways, with a relatively straightforward plot: Mahito needs to find Natsuko and rescue her, because he feels responsible for her being captured to begin with. Beyond that, Mahito must come to accept Natsuko as his mother, and embrace the future instead of living in terror of the past. The heron entices Mahito into entering the Tower in the first place by promising him that he can find his mother there, and he does, in fact, meet her–as a much younger girl named Lady Himi, on her own journey of magical self-discovery, and at the end of the film, Mahito must let Himi return to her own time so that he can be born, even though she knows that that path ends with her death at the hospital. Time goes forward, and we must accept that instead of trying to build our own perfect reality.

That’s not a metaphor, by the way. We eventually learn that the reason the Tower Master set this all into motion (I think? It’s honestly pretty ambiguous) is because he wanted Mahito to become his heir. This whole universe was constructed by him via a compact with the magic meteorite that forms the bedrock of the Tower (it crash-landed in Japan in the 1860s, right before the Meiji Restoration), and every three days he must construct a tower from stone toy blocks to keep it from collapsing. The Tower Master has done this for centuries, shaping and crafting this own private universe, but he has grown weary, and wishes for Mahito to take on his burden.

But just describing the plot undersells how strange this whole world is and dreamlike so much of the runtime is. It reminds me a great deal of Susanna Clarke’s wonderful 2021 novel Piranesi, a world of walls and windows and water and birds, endless and infinite, but all contained within a single building. There is something about that contradiction that seems to fascinate us, the juxtaposition of the domestic and foreign spheres within the same space.

Like the House of Piranesi, the Tower of The Boy and the Heron is both beautiful and terrible. As Mahito journeys through it, we see it a stark and forbidding place, filled with the phantoms of the dead, and haunted by dangers. It’s also clearly beginning to fall apart. The Parakeets are out-breeding their food supply, and threatening to eat everybody else as their legions fill up the world, the Pelicans starve because they cannot eat the fish, and so must hunt the Warawara, spirits who will someday be born in our world as humans, and are in turn hunted by Lady Himi and Kiriko. Mahito’s great-granduncle built this world, but it does not seem like he did a particularly good job–perhaps because the stones he uses to build his tower every three days were already infected by “malice”. Much like the early scenes, in wartime Japan, the film presents this world with unselfconscious candor, rarely stopping to explain anything. It expects us to take it for granted, to appreciate that there is a logic and an order underpinning everything, even if we can’t see it, and because the the film believes it, so does the viewer. The frequent references to “taboo” and “transgression” reinforces this; like all magic, there are rules here, and breaking them has consequences, even for the wise and powerful. That Mahito entered Natsuko’s delivery room gives power over the Tower Master to the Parakeet King. As the saying goes, you cannot hex an honest man. Meanwhile, the haunting grandeur and impossible architecture of the time-and-space-spanning Tower is leavened with raw, organic imagery; the guts and blood of a butchered fish, the droppings of birds spattering across the rocks, pulling us back to Earth. It’s tempting to assume that everything is a metaphor, and that we’re just here to Learn a Valuable Lesson, but it all feels a little bit too strange for that, like we’re just catching a glimpse of something beyond our comprehension.

What does the heron represent? A terrifying mystical presence with is eventually revealed to be more of a workaday schlub with a heart of gold, but though he proves central to Mahito’s journey, I don’t know what we’re supposed to take away from him or his role in this world. This world is haunted by the dead, and gives birth to the souls of the unborn, is it some part of some inter-universal cycle of cosmic reincarnation? How do we reconcile that with the fact that the Tower Master built this world, sometime in the late 19th century? What about the parakeets? Does an insatiable and endless army of cannibal parakeets have some significance in Japanese culture or folklore that I’m missing? The parallels between the parakeets–seen marching in military formation and waving fascist iconography and signs praising “the Duce“–and Imperial Japan seem unmistakable. One empire starving away, one gorging itself on gluttony, what is the movie saying here? The parakeets are terrifying and monstrous, but they’re also absurd, little pets puffed up on their own dreams of glory. Perhaps that is the commentary, or perhaps I’m overthinking it, or perhaps underthinking it. The central arcs of Heron feel so freighted with meaning and symbolism that I keep trying to interpret the surrounding world through the same lens, but perhaps it is just strange for the sake of strangeness.

In the end, the quest for Natsuko is something of an anticlimax. When she needs to leave the Tower, she does, the emotional climax occurs when Mahito first addresses her as “mother”. Likewise, there is no glorious final battle to save the world from the parakeets, or showdown with the wizard. Instead, Mahito is offered a choice. His great-granduncle wants him to take over as custodian of the Tower, and has “traveled across all of Time and Space” in order to find building blocks that have not yet been stained by malice, giving Mahito the chance to build his own universe, one potentially free of disorder and heartbreak and misery. But he rejects this offer, choosing to return home instead.

Matt Schley, writing in The Japan Times, argued that the movie is about the choice between continuing the cycle of violence wrought by Japan in the Pacific War or whether to “under trying circumstances, rise to the occasion and do better”. Writing for Slant, Cole Kronman sees the moral center of the film in the Tower Master’s final plea to Mahito that “there is work to be done”, a call for action, rather than apathy–an interesting interpretation given that Mahito does not complete the work. He fails. The Tower falls, the world ends. When Mahito refuses the blocks, the Parakeet King seizes them by force, and tries to erect a new world himself. It falls, because fascism will not allow you to rebuild the world, merely to destroy it. In understanding only force and violence and expansion, the King is unable to save himself or his people. I do not think we are supposed to hate the Tower Master, or see him as a villain. He is portrayed very sympathetically, and reportedly based off of Miyazaki’s longtime directorial partner Isao Takahata. But I think the movie sees his quest to build his own private universe as inherently flawed. When he offers the untainted blocks to Mahito, references a scar on his head, inflected by himself so as to avoid having to return to school, and describing it as “his own malice”. We humans are all tainted by malice. We cannot build a world without it, nor should we try. All we can do is our best.

More than any other of his movies, this feels like a project that Miyazaki made for himself, first and foremost. Visually, it is a smorgasbord of echoing patterns from the last thirty years of his filmography; the flying paper cranes from Spirited Away, the enchanted blob-people from Howl’s Moving Castle, the retreat to the countryside from My Neighbor Totoro, the cute little nature spirits from, well, Totoro, as well as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, the fascination with cooperative female labor that suffuses most of those movies, etc, and so much more. But thematically, it also feels like a deeply personal story, in a way that Studio Ghibli films usually aren’t. There is not a clear and unambiguous answer at the end of the movie, perhaps because Miyazaki does not know one at the end of his career. He has given us what he can, but there is no way to keep the world turning forever. You have to keep stacking and re-stacking those blocks.

In Japanese, the movie was titled How Do You Live?, with the name taken from a 1937 novel by Genzaburō Yoshino that appears briefly in the film as a keepsake left for Mahito by his mother. The book was written for children, and is about a teenager reflecting on the problems and worries of his life and the world, and how he wants to address them. The movie, however, provides no such answer. It is an open-ended question that can be resolved only by living itself. The Boy and the Heron ends abruptly and with little fanfare, with the family returning to Tokyo two years after the end of the war. Whether Mahito remembers his adventures, and what he has learned form them, remains unstated. All we really know is that life goes on, and that Mahito has chosen to live it.

It’s hard for me to evaluate The Boy and the Heron in the context of Hayao Miyazaki’s filmography, simply because so many of his movies were so foundational to the development of my aesthetics and artistic sensibility and view of the world. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service—I’ve seen these movies dozens of times over the course of my whole life. The Boy and the Heron, no matter how well-made it is, certainly can’t compete with the emotional resonance of those films, at least for me. But watching it for a second time, just before attempting to write this article, it is impossible not to be at least a little bit in awe of it, how strange and personal and weird and unique it is willing to do.

It’s a statement piece, by an artist who has nothing left to prove and nothing left to earn, who just wants to see where his vision takes him, and we’re all better off for having it.

Welcome back to what is becoming a semi-regular segment of sorts, where I talk to friends of mine in the Tranquility Press community who write historical Star Trek fiction! Longtime readers will know that this is a passion of mine, and that I am find the whole topic really interesting, both in its own right and as a way of looking and exploring history. Today I’m very happy to host Benjamin Nielsen, who has been working on an incredibly ambitious series of stories exploring the so-called “Lost Century” between Star Trek: Enterpriseand Star Trek: Discovery, looking at the birth of the Federation and how it emerged as a major power under the presidency of Jonathan Archer.

Today we’re going to talk about that, his writing process, why we both love writing fake history so much, and the important of AO3 and fanfiction to how we evolved as writers and thinkers.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Thank you to Benjamin for doing yeoman’s work on that!

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All right. Hello! So I’m here with Benjamin Nielsen, who is the writer of Too Late: A Star Wars Story, San Francisco 2161: 47 Days that Changed the Galaxy and Created the United Federation of Planets, and his ongoing project, The Last Founder: The Presidency of Jonathan Archer, 2185 to 2192. Like so many other people I know, he is a writer of Star Trek historical fan fiction. And we’re here to talk about that and how he approaches writing. So thanks for joining me, Ben! 

Thank you so much for having me, Nathan. I really appreciate this opportunity to talk a little bit about my writing, especially because you’ve inspired a lot of it even before we started chatting or brainstorming together. And I’m really appreciative that you’ve given me space here to talk about that process,  and what brings me to that work.

Aw, thank you. Yeah. 

And I guess, in particular,  what sort of unites and doesn’t necessarily unite the way in which we view writing Trek and its position in 2025–

Well, now 2026

Oh wow, yeah, 2026. 

Oh, yeah. Just keeps on going. (laughter). So you’re in the middle right now of your history of the presidency of Jonathan Archer. So, just very general to start this off, why did you choose that in particular?

This was a topic that became more interesting to me the further into the brainstorming period that we went. In the fall of 2024, I was finishing the second draft of another novel-length Star Trek fan nonfiction–San Francisco 2161: 47 Days that Changed the Galaxy and Created the United Federation of Planets–which is something that we know vaguely about from Trek lore, but it’s the place and time in which the United Federation of Planets was created. 

I was thinking about the various ways in which that story comes together and how things work practically in the creation of the Federation. If more than anything else, that meant I had to do a lot of primary research into some areas I knew very little about: the Yalta Conference, the UN Conference on International Organization, the First West African Summit Conference, etc. Some beta readers started asking that dreaded question for any writer: What comes next? 

It led me to the idea that there’s quite a lot of Trek lore between the end of Star Trek Enterprise, the early 2000s television show, and then fan work like The Edge of Midnight and the Original Series, which is more than a century later. So there’s like a hundred years of basically nothing in there, right? And when I say nothing, I don’t even mean no TV show; there are no events of any kind.

Yeah. Well, we do know at least one thing. From the Mirror Universe episodes of Enterprise, we see that Jonathan Archer became President of the Federation.

Exactly, but there’s something quite intriguing in how that worked. That reference makes it clear that he became President more than two decades after the Federation was created. The idea that Jonathan Archer becomes the president of the Federation, but he is not the first president of the Federation, is intriguing, because I think it’s very easy to make Jonathan Archer out, especially for Americans, to be the George Washington of the Federation. But he’s not! 

So I was reading a biography of James Monroe a couple of years ago, called The Last Founding Father by Harlow Giles Unger, and he’s an interesting one in that this sort of posits in there he’s one of the last individuals who, as an adult, has memories of a pre-revolutionary world in America.

The fifth president of the United States, but the last to really have adult memories of a pre-Revolution America.

Right? You know, Quincy Adams and Jackson obviously have their Revolutionary War stories, but they were teenagers. And that’s quite important, that they don’t really understand what it was to have lived in a pre-America world. Jonathan Archer is a leader who understands what it was like to live in a pre-Federation Star Trek universe.

Ok, yeah. That’s interesting.  

And so I thought that’d be very interesting on it’s own, but if I’m being honest talking about what the role of a president is in 2025 was something I was spending a lot of time thinking about because, you know, *gestures broadly*, and the thought that Star Trek is usually a great way of speaking about these topics to ears that might be closed to them otherwise. 

I think that’s very interesting. Specifically, your choice of doing all of this political writing about Star Trek is really intriguing to me, because Star Trek is kind of notorious for spending zero time on explaining how its politics work in any way, shape, or form. You know, the Federation has a President because America has a President, and the writer spent three seconds thinking about that and had to move on. So it has been really enjoyable watching you–and other people–but I think you’ve really focused on this, kind of digging into the political system and figuring out, okay, how does this actually work though? What does the Federation Council really look like? What does the president look like in this weird decentralized, you know, Federation of theoretically sovereign states?

Yeah, it’s one of the hilarious parts about Star Trek. For a show that is all about ethical journeys and political conundrums, they are never very interested in developing any of these things in the sense of world-building. Part of that obviously makes sense because it’s a TV show, and so once you start making rules about the universe, then you lock your storytelling capacity down, which can be bad. I think that’s entirely fair. 

The beauty of writing this as a fan work is that nobody has to pay any attention to it from the point of view of an entertainment company. Also, there’s a way of writing these fan works that allows for lots of gaps. One of the self-imposed rules that I try to put on my writing is not to make lists. By that I mean, make lists of things that have names and secured dates, but no story. Doing so is really limiting to others who want to play in the same metaphorical sandbox if you do that. If I’m establishing world-building, I try to make it have a point in the narrative first, not form a narrative around a wiki page I’ve just created. I think it’s better to treat the story like an author from an in-universe perspective.

It’s a real advantage of the genre. I had someone once–someone left a really nice comment on one of my pseudo-historical essays, saying “Oh, this is so cool, I wish I could write this kind of thing, but I have trouble even writing about real history!” And I had to explain to them that this is actually much easier, because you can just make up your own sources when you need them.

You get to fabricate all the evidence. It’s so much easier. I know this is why so many hack historians do it in the first place. It’s just way easier to do it this way.

It lets you focus on the narrative, and what the author is saying. And in this case, authors, because to dig into The Last Founder: The Presidency of Jonathan Archer, 2185 to 2192, you’ve posited that this is a book about the Archer presidency, written by two biographers, about a hundred years after the Archer presidency, so after he is dead, and there has been some historical perspective.

Exactly, and even that framing device has allowed me to move further away from making entirely declarative statements about the world. That [framing] means you can have two conflicting storylines in the same chapter because there are two authors, and I mean that in-universe, so the authors can take certain things for granted as they exist in the Star Trek world, but then have to explain in greater detail some stories we might know. 

Yes. These political stories.

It’s been really interesting to bridge that gap because, rightly, I think, there is a general criticism or view of much of Trek is that the characters are overall extremely American and, in the case of Enterprise, even for the time, a bit outdated as historical models. The clear visual and thematic palette reads early NASA: adventure, egos, machismo, etc. I think we have a more nuanced understanding of that time now; it was a lot of nerds, many people of color, with calculators doing as important work as any dude who went into a rocket. Courageous as they also were, it was a team job. But this is how Archer is presented to us, a largely walking embodiment of the great man of history theory.

Oh, very much so. 

A theory that was beaten out of me in college, taking poli sci and history classes, because that was completely out of vogue, and the research no longer would support that falsehood. So we’re presented with someone who has immense success as both a hierarchical leader in both Starfleets; United Earth Starfleet, and then eventually United Federation of Planets Starfleet. How does that then translate when he becomes an intergalactic celebrity? 

So add on social power, soft power, to an experience of giving orders. How does that translate into being the President of this Council? I’ve addressed in this story that at this time period, the position is probably more appropriately described as like the Speaker of the House and not even Speaker in an American way, but like Parliament.

Yeah. I think you’ve spoken about this before on the Worlds in Progress podcast, but you’ve articulated this time period of Federation politics as very different from what others have written. There’s this very fun sort of metatextual idea where Archer becomes president and thinks he’s still the star of the TV show. You know, “Oh, this is the same thing as when I was on TV. Every episode is about me saving the day.” Everyone else on the Council is like, “Ok, no, that’s not what we signed up for.”

Yes, every other councilor thinks they are on their own show called The Councilor! (laughter) It’s a good example of how both my perspective and my political knowledge grew in partnership with the Tranquility Press, and the ability to reach a more international audience now. So there is not an expectation that everyone reading this is going to have cultural awareness from an exclusively American lens, which I do feel like when Star Trek produced television shows wander into politics, it is almost exclusively through this lens, and in particular, since Deep Space Nine, a pretty exclusively, like, “West Wing” lens.

Yeah, no, I think that’s very correct. I think it has always amused me that the Federation is established as having a Presidential system, because I think that’s very unlikely. I think it would absolutely have had a Parliamentary system, given how the UFP is supposed to be structured, and how we see it working. And it has a presidency because, you know, the writers assumed it would have a president because America has a president, and those are the kinds of political plots that they automatically think of. Which makes sense, but it’s very silly in practice.

Yes, and I think that that is one of the boons to those of us who are writing about this, is that it is very fertile ground to see how far I get away with saying, “OK, well, there has to be a president, but what if it looked nothing like the presidents we know?”

I think it’s interesting because, you know, we both do a lot of this Star Trek fake history writing. We’re both kind of associated with the Tranquility Press crew. And I think it’s an interesting question of why we enjoy it so much. And for me, at least, part of the joy of this is that there’s so much–there’s a real–it’s very fun working within those limitations. You know, where you start out with all of these things that have already been established, and you don’t have a clear slate, you have to try to make something that makes sense, while also taking into account all these other insane ideas that somebody came up with in 1968 and put zero thought into. You treat it as a text or teaching text.

Yeah, it’s really fun to do both, and I think there is a balancing act. I’m reminded of the work you’ve done exploring the Pakleds. Like the concept of the Pakleds in Star Trek is just a joke as presented in its original TNG episode, but because it is a joke, Lower Decks treats it like worldbuilding. And then you do that final step, which I think is what I do too, which is treat the world-building like it’s important again, but remember it’s a joke. 

This is what I have liked about your work and something I try to replicate in mine. If I try to rationalize the most absurd, least thought-out, most directly contradictory portions of this franchise, that’s where I have some fun. How would people in school who have to learn about this, read about it? Right. And because a lot of writing is, you know, research and solitary work a lot of the time, you do have to make yourself laugh along the way.

I’m just gonna say here that it is one of the things I always love when somebody, like, takes the time to really analyze something I’ve written, and dig into it and be like, “Well, you say this, and the implications of that will be this, this and this, and I think you mean….”, and you know, I just love the fact that somebody is putting that much like brain power, just always delights me. So thank you. 

No problem. I love that there seems to be two or three different types of people who want to read this type of fan work, and two that I personally really appreciate for different reasons are the people who are following it so closely that they are practically copy editing and leave comments like, “I think one of the names is spelled wrong”. I appreciate that it is how they are choosing to consume this. The other is the type that couldn’t tell me a single character name, but then, like six months after it’s released, will create some long rebuttal or thesis, really digging into a topic. Even if they disagree with me, it’s because they’ve engaged so entirely with the theme that they don’t actually care about the text anymore. That’s very motivating for someone who wants to continue to do this work. For anyone starting their own writing, there are definitely both of those people out there, and they will read your stuff.

Yeah, just over the last few years, discovering that this community exists has been just really stunning and wonderful because it’s something i had done a little bit of myself–kind of independently–and then I read Edge of Midnight and kind of stumbled into the Tranquility sphere and discovered that like, there are people out there who are writing full books of this stuff!

Yeah, I know what you mean. I think we probably started connecting in mid-2024, because I had just read your “Reconstructing the Crisis of the 21st Century,” and really loved it. That was so excellent and so well-documented in the way that I was hoping mine would actually work out as well. It didn’t take very long for me to dragoon you into being a beta reader for basically all of my stuff at this point. (laughter). 

Well, I was happy to help! 

Was that sort of your first attempt at sort of writing like an actual historical fan non-fiction, or like, where were you getting these ideas even prior to reading Edge of Midnight and other things like that?

Well, the first thing–I just actually went back and checked this–the first thing I wrote in this vein was in 2019, and it was called A Strategic Analysis of Federation Defense Policy Immediately Prior to the Dominion War, and it was an internal document for the Starfleet Office of Strategic Planning. It was excoriating the defense policy and pointing out all the ways in which they had catastrophically failed to prevent the Dominion from attacking. I started from there, in 2019 and 2020, to keep writing about these topics on AO3.

Yeah.

From there, I just kept going, and discovered Edge of Midnight, which was really the gateway drug for me…

That was the gateway for so many of us. I cannot honestly recall at this point if it was Edge of Midnightor if it was, We Have Engaged the Borg that was my introduction, but I do remember just being delightfully surprised that there was an audience. Largely because I hadn’t actually even started any Trek work at that point. My first writing was another novel-length story, but it was Star Wars, and it was a Tumblr-era AO3 situation. Way back in the days when my college roommate was posting, back in like 2013, in the heyday of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes stories. 

That’s right. You are also no stranger to the AO3.

Oh, of course. AO3 is really the best. It’s where I learned that there was a way to tell stories on your own without having to make it into a business model, which is sort of more interesting to me, knowing just how difficult that business model is now. That same roommate worked in publishing for nearly a decade, and it was so depressing to hear about. In those fun days of innocence (the second Obama term), I was like cold-pitching stories to Lucas Books before she explained to me how this works. (laughter)

But reading Edge of Midnight and your work, it was interesting to see that there are more ways to do fan fiction than the sort of often parodied with barely concealed misogyny that often fanfic is talked about. And so it was, it was really cool to sort of get that sense from your writing. There were far more ways to do this art than I had originally thought. 

So your first story was also novel-length, but it was about Star Wars?

Yes, Too Late: A Star Wars Story. It was a story about journalists researching a murder at the end of the Republic, and their investigation leads them to learn the big secret of the Clone Wars. How they do it would be a spoiler, but it suffices to say the story starts about two weeks before the events of [Star Wars Episode 3:] Revenge of the Sith and ends concurrently with the opening sequence of that film. 

So for me, it was telling a story like a Slow Horses story in plot, but in POV-style like The Expanse books. So that sort of taught me that, like, there is a way in which you can use the tropes and the language of fanfiction that has been developed online since, like, the mid-90s to tell what would normally be classed as, like, quote-unquote, more serious stories that make both of them better. I then learned I probably should have just done Steve/Bucky, so that people would have actually read it.

It’s likely why I was so drawn to your work that tried to look at you know, how these events would be seen three hundred years after the Empire falls, because the people are going to think that the emperor wasn’t a Sith or the Jedi are a myth, right? Like, I think that’s fabulous.

Yeah yeah yeah. It’s funny, because I first met John– the writer of Edge of Midnight–we first connected on AO3 because we were both writing She-Ra fanfic, and then he left a comment on one of my Star Trek pieces and was like: “Oh, I have this project called Edge of Midnight, you should check it out”, and so I went to the website and was just like: “Oh my god, this is just so much bigger than anything I had ever dreamed of doing”, because I had been writing these, like, 2,000 word internal Starfleet documents, which were fun and all, and then I went to his website and it was like 200,000 words and had graphs and charts and galleries of images and spin-offs and i was just like “Oh my god I didn’t know this is what I wanted but this is what I want.” 

I had a very similar experience, because by the time I interacted with people like John and then Andy from the Tranquility Press, their works were already comparatively huge in the community, so it was all very aspirational. In late 2023, they started asking for pitches in a sort of more meaningful way. And at the time, I pitched an Earth-Romulan War project and was connected with the author of the work that has become In The Raptor’s Claw, PJ. 

Who I interviewed here just a few months ago! Yeah, and PJ has consulted and been a beta reader on San Francisco, 2161, and The Last Founder…

Absolutely, and we sort of basically pitched two different things at the same time and then were put together. It was a really interesting connection, which ended up in a great, like, life lesson. He was so open to working together, and his story pitch was just better. He had such a specific historical analog in mind, as you know, in referencing his deep knowledge of World War One history. He knew it inside and out, frontwards and backwards, so he could do the thing that the most successful writers of fan non-fiction do: create your own story.

He doesn’t just one-to-one match these things, which is another trap that I think a lot of fanfic writers can get into. I’m talking about saying, “I’m going to do the Battle of Gettysburg, but it’s going to be in space.” That never rings true because the Battle of Gettysburg happened as it did, because it took place in a specific time and location, and you can’t just plop that somewhere else and have it feel real. 

PJ is so good about adapting specific historical circumstances to achieve interesting outcomes that feel tied to their new location. Verex III, Coridan, Cheron, the list goes on. His vision has been so clear and concise, the lesson that sometimes other people have better pitches, and that should be seen not as a failing, but as an opportunity to get better by association, was good learning for me. I’ve learned so much from being his beta reader, and he’s been so generous with his time and talents. I’d encourage a lot of folks who are trying to write their own projects to view similar projects in this way. 

So it’s been fabulous to be working with him now for what, you know, almost two years now on three different projects.

Yes, his work, In the Raptor’s Claw, is finishing shortly. Do you know what he’s doing next? 

Hopefully, taking a much-deserved rest, but I have some ideas of what he might want to tackle next. He’s got some other great ideas.

So, to pivot back to your Star Trek stories, you tackled the famous question. “How does utopia pass a budget?” in San Francisco, 2161, and now transitioned to a character study of Jonathan Archer.

Yes, I have. And I feel like that’s where being in a fan fiction space allows you to sort of pick those up and start running; I can make this more of a character study rather than a history book because of the experience. And so I think in particular, talking about Archer, it’s first and foremost a book about politics. Much of what I wanted to talk about was how to create a multipolar system where there is no longer a political incentive to be a bad agent, but maybe there is to be a principled individualist. We don’t often get to see these in our various political systems, even when that person thinks that is what they are doing. 

This was useful in thinking about Archer, the person. He is an institutionalist, but perhaps only because he built the institution. He is a unionist, but perhaps only because he literally signed the Federation Charter. He is an optimist, but perhaps only because he was given a literal vision of the future in which he is necessary for the Federation and the continuance of Humanity. What does that do to a leader’s brain? And more importantly, does Archer ever tell anyone about that vision? 

This is something a real historian doesn’t have to deal with, because it would read as editorializing. But fiction gives us more to play with sometimes.   

And so that was most interesting in the term, in terms of thinking about Archer as a person. And part of that, that you would think about from an outside perspective, is the more structural or institutional knowledge, which is useful that we see in Enterprise. But something that stuck out to me was the concept that, you know, due to an episode of Enterprise, Archer knows that without him, or at least believes, there is no such thing as the Federation. If he doesn’t exist, there is no Federation. And if there’s no Federation, then Humanity, big H, collapses. He was given a very compelling image of the future, and like, not in a, like, took ayahuasca in the desert way. And so what does that do to a person’s brain? How does that both motivate your actions and really fundamentally screw you up in some ways?

Yeah, and there are several ways to deal with that from a story perspective. Does he tell no one? Does he tell some people, which tells the reader who he trusts? Or there’s the other option, of course, that he just will not shut up about it. That it is like every speech he’s like, “Let me tell you I went to the future. I went to the future this time, and they told me…”, and everyone is like, “We know Jonathan, we’re so tired of hearing about this…” (laughter)

Yeah. And it’s been helpful that this isn’t a traditional biography. One of the early questions from beta readers was, why don’t you just do a biography of Archer? And the reason is that the timeline for Archer’s life that these writers have concocted is so long and so full that it is nearly impossible. I mean, I covered nearly 70 years of his life in my prologue, and that was an exercise in cutting and editing I don’t wish to replicate, and it’s still too long. The life of Jonathan Archer is A Song of Ice and Fire-sized, and I did really want to finish the story. 

Yeah, and it has the advantage that you’re not retreading ground. The show already showed it, as it were, and you don’t have to engage with anything that isn’t relevant to your story. You can assume the reader saw it, and leave it to the background.

Yeah. It’s something that I have appreciated in other works, and something that I, I often tell people to come to me for some advice. If we’ve already seen it on TV, you should probably cover the event of any episode of TV or any movie in about one sentence. Make a reason if you need to push it to a paragraph. There’s nothing worse in fic than realizing the chapter is just a wiki page of something you’ve already seen.

I do think this gets into, especially with Star Trek, the interesting point that our primary source is a television show. So when we treat it like historical data, we have to ask, did this really happen? Did it happen in the way we saw, literally word for word? It raises questions of how we are to treat scenes in which the camera is pointed, as opposed to those that are implied but behind prop doors.

Yeah! This reminds me that when I don’t have a story to mind, I try to go back to the old historian question of “how do we know that they said that?” It was a question that one of my favorite professors would stammer at a student who was getting a bit too bold and spouting too much supposition. “How do we know they said that!?” It’s definitely where I waste time, but it’s because I do find it to be the most important question to any of this writing. It’s the only thing that we can call grounded in this work. How do we know this? Who said it? How does the author of this in-universe know about it? 

And then where is that coming from? That’s what takes up a solid, you know, third of the time of actual writing in the book. Mostly because people are reading them and paying attention. They often get more conversation than the actual chapters.

I’ve noticed that too. You seem to want to figure out how the author gets the information to write the book. 

And it, it can go either way, right? For example, the Edge of Midnight recently dealt with the TOS episode Balance of Terror. We have direct quotations from characters, but when writing a history book, you would have to answer the question, “How does the author of the book know that?” 

The character in the universe did not watch the episode of the show, but the person who is reading that work out of universe has. This is where a lot of the early adopters of the work that we’re doing come into play. I feel that I’m living the legacy of early RPG guides when I straddle the line between expectation and story. Right.

Yeah, I think that’s one of the most interesting things to do with this kind of fiction–exploring the delta between what the author knows and the viewers know and the characters know, and kind of looking at it like, well how would somebody on Earth interpret all this? What would somebody ten years in the future interpret all this as? How would they put this information together and that’s what I love to do, is to take those gaps and explore them.

It is one of the things that I think has been quite successful, at least for me, and reading the works that you’ve done with Trek is that you have an innate understanding of both. How can we play in areas where the readers know more than the characters?

It came into the text rather early in San Francisco, 2161, where we played with the fact that the author, in-universe, of that book died without the knowledge that Vulcans and Romulans look the same. So he had to deal with all of these inexplicable things the Vulcans seemed to be doing without context, whereas by the time the authors of The Last Founder are alive, everyone knows they were desperately trying to deal with secret Vulcans without alerting anyone. 

I mean, there’s a Romulan secret agent that signed the Federation Charter in my story! Which, again, at no point in the text is there even a suggestion that that’s what’s happening. It is exclusively a conversation between real people, both me writing and the careful readers who know their Star Trek. It has nothing to do with the fiction part of it, which is kind of fun. 

Yeah, yeah, it’s very metatextual in a way that I think is one of the things you kind of only do with this very specific niche genre that we both work in.

It’s my idea of what might have happened in the Edwardian era, where everyone of certain privilege in Europe has read the Aeneid, so everyone can get the cultural references, should you make them in Latin, even if you don’t understand another word of each other’s languages. 

Agreed! Now, as we come up on nearly forty minutes now, I want to make sure we get to this topic, because it’s the thing that you had specifically discussed wanting to talk about today. I’m talking about the relationship between Jonathan Archer and Thy’lek Shran, which I think is pretty important to this book? 

This is a good connection point because obviously if we’re talking about AO3 and we’re talking about Archer as a character, then we have to take a stance on the topic most covered on that site: what is the relationship between Archer and Shran? This came up with the introduction of the pitch that Mike Sussman made to Paramount about a show called Star Trek United.

That news came out last summer while you were releasing San Francisco, 2161, but after you had started brainstorming The Last Founder, right?  

Precisely. And the thesis of “what is the Archer presidency?” had been rolling around ever since the cancellation of Enterprise without them being able to address the Earth-Romulan war. Since then, Mike has shared more details about Archer’s quite extensive family.  I think for a TV show, that’s genius because that makes a lot of really good storytelling possibilities. But a history book is different, and when we were sort of talking about Archer at the very, very beginning, we thought a little bit about the fact that a part of his character is that he’s basically an orphan. His father dies when he is 12, and in all of Enterprise, the writers had Archer mention his mother perhaps twice. So while I’m not interested in minimizing female influences, we do have to work with what we’re given, or we’re in AU territory, which is fine, but not what I’m doing.  

From there, the impulse is to take it further and extrapolate that in terms of “nuclear family,” Archer has basically none. I’ve indicated that there’s not a whole lot of extended family, and those who do exist are not close to him. And so then you get into the concept of where he goes to for counsel or advice, right? 

I think what we are presented with in Enterprise is that he has a chosen family. A found family, at the core of which is the Enterprise crew, some members of Starfleet, and by the end of the show, Shran. Shran has more scenes with Archer in the Enterprise than with various officers on the ship who are main characters. That’s how I came to the final thesis: Shran is the most important relationship of Jonathan Archer’s life. They are soulmates, but not romantic. They love each other, but have other relationships. They have a connection we don’t often get to explore. 

It is something I think that’s very much in keeping with–I don’t know the exact words here, but you know, naval fiction, military fiction, Napoleonic Wars–the roots of a lot of Star Trek that include these very deep emotional or brotherly bonds between people that aren’t necessarily sexual but are like incredibly intense–

Yes, exactly. I don’t know enough about Master and Commander to talk to the Aubrey-Maturin relationship, but I think that’s a useful analogue. From my own references, I often thought about Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings. There is a power dynamic there that doesn’t exist with Shran and Archer, but it’s a useful starting point. 

Yes, I was gonna say Shran would, I think, get very offended if you said he was Sam in this relationship.

Oh yes, Shran thinks he’s Frodo. (laughter) Archer very much exists in Shran’s story, not the other way around. It is an exploration of, you know, an incredibly intense emotional relationship that has a level of trust and loyalty and honesty that, when you then extrapolate it into the fact that they served together on the Federation Council, this equality had reached a natural conclusion. They were both at the apex of what they thought their service could provide. 

So what happens when Archer becomes the President of the Council? And furthermore, what happens when Archer tries to make the position even more powerful, no longer the leader of the Council, but President of the Federation in totality? 

Yeah, there is no longer an option for them to remain equals, either in name or reality.

So that was very rich storytelling fodder to do a couple of things I wanted to explore. The first chapter to deal with this dropped recently, here in January of 2026, about the first break in that relationship. They’re no longer able to communicate on a level playing field because they no longer are on one. And what happens then when the way in which you’ve communicated for 30 years changes because of power dynamics? 

That’s what has been fascinating for me with Archer, because this is character work that doesn’t require me to have seventeen tabs of obscure old lore open or double-checking alien name spelling. I can just write character and relationship. It is alluded to in San Francisco, 2161, that there’s a very, very significant political break between the two that kind of stymies a lot of the legislative reform that should have happened earlier in the timeline, but we don’t actually see it until TOS. 

So that’s been the most interesting part so far for me. What if I could tell the story of the founding of America, but it’s largely through the relationship of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, for a partial historical analogue? That has been most interesting to me.

Yes, and I think there has been another aspect to Archer that we’ve talked about before. Archer comes from this core of a military background, right? So he understands many institutions from a hierarchical viewpoint. In a benign way, he knows where he is in relation to everyone else and is able to maneuver based on where he exists. He’s shown to be very good at that. So it makes sense that it becomes an issue when becomes President, or President of a Council where those hierarchies are completely blurred. No one seems to be responding to orders, and the people who are might not be the ones you want in charge of things. 

Precisely, and in many ways, we’re shown that when the two meet, Shran is in a more powerful position. The Andorian Empire isn’t just starting to tip-toe into the universe like Humans; he’s a powerful military leader in a powerful military state. 

Yeah, that’s a good point to remember and is an interesting microcosm of the big, complex political dynamics you’d set up in the early Federation. These powers have spent centuries, in some cases as sovereign, regional powers, and now they all have to grapple with how they can exert power within this new system they’ve all signed on to. I think that confusion and ultimate optimism are a great way to end our chat; your work does both very frequently. Is there anything we didn’t talk about that you want to talk about? Is there anything you want people to know about your projects that we didn’t mention?

You’ve been asking really, really great questions here today. I’m working on new chapters of The Last Founder: The Presidency of Jonathan Archer, and those have been released about every two weeks. So far, there are seven posted, so feel free to check them out while I finish up Chapter 8, which is the beginning of a very consequential conference.

My first Star Trek story, San Francisco, 2161 is complete, and you can read it on my website now. The Tranquility Press is also working on an official .pdf version that should be available in late Spring 2026. 

And if you are interested in Star Trek, Star Wars, or any of my work, you can always check out www.nascentnovice.com

All right, thank you so much for joining me, Ben can’t wait to see what you do next.

Thank you so much, thanks for having me.

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If this was interesting, or you want to learn more about Tranquility Press and Star Trek fictional non-fiction, you can follow them at @tranquilitypress.bsky.social, and read their amazing library of fictional history over here. You can follow Ben over at @nascentnovice.bsky.social for updates and daily musings, and catch up on all of his longform fiction at his personal website.

TITLE: Red Storm Rising

AUTHOR: Tom Clancy

PUBLISHER: G.P. Putnam’s Sons

DATE: 1986

I am tempted to call Red Storm Rising a classic “guilty pleasure” novel, but I think that obscures the fact that this is actually kind of a masterpiece of its genre. Tom Clancy is, of course, known for Cold War techno thrillers, most of whom featured his protagonist Jack Ryan, and most of which descended into self-parody as Clancy got more and more self-indulgent. Red Storm Rising is an interesting exception. It’s one of his earlier novels, it’s relatively-grounded and realistic, and instead of being a thrilling spy adventure about a secret agent saving the world, it’s an attempt to plot out what a World War III scenario might have looked liked in the mid-1980s, using contemporary technology and tactics. It’s also just really good, in the workmanlike structure of pacing and plot and writing that are so easy to overlook when they’re there, and and impossible to ignore when they’re absent. Frankly, I love this book, and returning to it again, several decades after I first discovered it, has just reinforced my appreciation for what an impressive achievement it is.

BACKGROUND:

In Siberia, a Soviet oil refinery burns, victim of a terrorist attack. In Moscow, the Politburo watches their economic forecasts sink further into despair, and begin formulating a desperate plan to salvage Soviet power while they still can. In Washington, analysts track Russian submarines and troop mobilization, and begin to predict the unthinkable. And on the front lines of Germany, Iceland, and Norway, in the waters of the cold Atlantic and the Barents Sea and underneath the depths of the ocean, in the skies above Europe and the ice of the Arctic Circle, in the empty void of orbital space itself, soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the two most powerful nations in world history are about to fight the war they’ve spent the last forty years training for.

WHAT I LIKED:

1. One of the most interesting things about this book is the way it was written–despite being solely credited to Clancy, it was a collaborative project with Larry Bond, an author and wargame designer, who’d caught Clancy’s attention with his attempts at simulating what a “modern” Battle of the Atlantic might look like. Several of the climactic battle scenes in Red Storm Rising were, in fact, scripted organically using the game Harpoon to try and imagine how aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, maritime bombers, and long-range cruise missiles would interact with each in the battlesphere, something that we had virtually no real-world data on. This ends up being key to what I think is Red Storm Rising’s greatest strength, its verisimilitude. It’s not that the book is “realistic” exactly, it portrays a number of events and outcomes that strike me as profoundly unlikely, but it makes a committed effort at visualizing and portraying 1980s naval and ground combat in depth and detail, to the point where people have gone full-circle and simulated the naval battles from the book. It feels like a real simulation or tactical war game, and that’s something that’s really enjoyable to dive into, at least for me. If you ever played RTS games, maybe you’ll know what I’m talking about, but there’s a real joy in designing the perfect Order of Battle and lining up all your toys and using them correctly, and the book captures that perfectly.
2. This also ties into what is, I think, one of Clancy’s real strengths as a writer—he always sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, and the litany of technical specifications and the interplay and interactions of SA-11s, RUR-5 ASROC launchers, Tupolev Tu-22M Backfires, E-2 Hawkeye AEW aircraft, 688-class nuclear submarines, BTR-80s, etc, on the page doesn’t feel like an infodump, but instead like you’re being read into a secret, and having the mysteries of a complex and hidden world opened up and explained to you. It’s almost competency porn, rarely is the day saved by somebody being a cool hero, or having a secret weapon, it’s usually because lots of people are working together to make the complex systems of modern war make work the way they’re supposed to. I’ve seen it described as procedural fiction, which I think is a very apt term. So much of it really is just people doing their jobs.
3. There is an interesting trend I’ve noticed, where the longer the career of a genre fiction writer lasts, the more distinctly themselves the books become, as they either get successful enough to start overruling editors, figure out what they really want to focus on, or both. Sometimes, this can be a huge improvement (Ursula K. LeGuin, Lois McMaster Bujold), sometimes it can be quite detrimental (S.M. Stirling, David Weber, John Scalzi). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Red Storm Rising was Clancy’s second book, before he became the brand Tom Clancy. It’s probably his best book, and it’s one of the very few that isn’t part of the Ryanverse, his broader series about fictional CIA operative and eventual President Jack Ryan. It’s much more grounded, much less self-indulgent. It’s really trying to describe a time and a place that actually existed, or could exist, rather than carrying out Clancy’s own wish-fulfillment fantasies and prosecuting various political grudges, and it’s a much better book for it.
4. The thing about Red Storm Rising that really sticks out to me, upon rereading it, is just how economical it is. That may seem like a strange thing to say about a book that’s 725 pages long, but it packs an extraordinary amount of content and plot into that, and it does so by making every single scene–and every single sentence–matter. We can get through a yearlong geopolitical crisis in less than a hundred pages because it’s never scared to jump from synopsis to snapshot, giving the readers enough context to imply everything going on without having to actually show it or describe it. Clancy also takes great pains to set up the plot so as to create a “limited war”, one that can be described in detail and still resolved within the confines of a single book. I recently read John Birmingham’s Axis of Time: Reloaded series, which is what prompted by reread of this, and it was incredibly frustrating how much time it spends meandering around on tangents and asides and throat-clearing that goes nowhere. Red Storm Rising is such a satisfying read because it recognizes that not every scene needs to be, or should be, action, but they should all be important. You really feel like you’re getting your money’s worth.

1. Red Storm Rising is told through multiple third-person limited POVs, we rarely get any omniscient narration, and we jump back and forth between characters routinely as we cover the various front lines and perspectives. The structure helps keep control of such a sprawling cast and plot; most of the protagonists are soldiers, thrown unexpectedly into war, and so questions of motivation and personality can be elided. We know why everyone is where they are, and what they’re trying to do. Despite that, it rarely feels shallow, even if it is simple–the characters feel like real human beings, caught up in events and struggling to make sense of them, and survive. The book is about an event, rather than any particular person, which I like. It never feels like the people we follow are the protagonists of reality, it just feels like we’re following along with them to get a representative cross-section of the war. We meet them abruptly, and leave them abruptly, carried to and fro by the tides of war and politics, and even the most powerful among them can only do their best to chart those treacherous waters.
2. The book feels like such a snapshot of Late Cold War politics in a way that I find fascinating; not so much the broader fears of nuclear annihilation and so on, but the way it is situated in this strategic landscape that had spent decades wargaming out these exact decisions and ideas. In “Dance of the Vampires”, the chapter documenting the clash between Soviet Maritime Aviation and Carrier Group Nimitz, we really understand that this is the result of literal decades of planning and preparation and practice for this exact scenario. There’s discussion elsewhere about the parlous state of the US Merchant Marine and the implication that would have for a Third Battle of the Atlantic, something I remember being discussed in Homer Hickam’s Torpedo Junction (1989) as well. It captures the feeling of a time and a place very well, and that very specific “amateur naval history and warfare buffs” milieu that Clancy emerged from. Also fascinating is that the book was published only four years before the Eastern Bloc began to disintegrate, and there is zero indication in here that that’s something that could happen, which is something I’ve seen in other books published around that time, such as Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987).
3. The Soviets kick an incredible amount of ass in this book, which is part of what makes it so fun. I’m not the first person to note Clancy’s strain of Russophilia, but it’s a fascinating bit of subtext, as the Soviet characters tend to get the most gravitas and depth, as well as a persistent theme in how they cleverly overcome the NATO advantages in technology and seapower. I tend to agree that this comes from the paradoxical willingness of authors to portray their villains as more complex and nuanced than their heroes. Russia in the 1980s is exotic and unknown, in the way that the US Navy is portrayed in text as extremely known, in granular detail. I also think there was a sort of general Russophilia among people who spent their whole lives studying the Soviet military and people, something that is signposted and lightly mocked in the book itself. The character of Bob Toland, an NSA intelligence analyst who loves the films of Sergei Eisenstein and watches them in the original Russian always reminded of a friend of mine from undergrad, who often struck me as something of a Cold Warrior born a little bit too late.
4. This, of course, ties into the ending of the book, which is fantastic. If you’re familiar with it, maybe it seems obvious, but I still remember how exciting and cool it was when I first read this and realized what was going on. You’d spent seven hundred pages by that point following these Soviet characters–Mikhail Eduardovich Sergetov, the honest and technocratic Energy Minister trying to keep the economy from collapsing, General Pavel Leonidovich Alekseyev, the loyal commander fighting for his Motherland, even though he knows his leadership doesn’t deserve it–and you know, of course, that the Americans are the good guys, but you’ve also fallen in love with your Russian buddies by now, and you don’t know how the book is going to give you a “good” ending and then–well it seems obvious, in retrospect. The heroic Russians, realizing that the Politburo has gone mad and is leading the USSR to destruction, stage a military coup d’etat and inaugurate a new regime that can make peace, and maybe lead the Soviet Union into a better future. It’s such a classic bit of wish fulfillment from the same milieu I was talking about earlier: What if the Russian soldiers, who we respect and kind of admire, could just get rid of all their evil politicians? Wouldn’t that be great? Almost a sort of evolution of the Clean Wehrmacht myth, in how it tries to create a military savior. All that said, it’s a very neat solution, and the fact that we get zero followup or elaboration after the ceasefire goes into effect probably helps it work.
5. It’s wild that Gorbachev is in this book? He’s never mentioned by name, but it’s clearly supposed to be him; all the references to the new General Secretary, young, a reformer, a man who came into office with high hopes, but squandered them. They even call out his birthmark, so you know it’s not a coincidence! Reagan maybe shows up in here, there’s one scene with an unnamed US President and he’s just like “Gwarsh, this war seems pretty bad, hope somebody stops it.” He was reportedly a big fan of the book, you gotta wonder if his opposite number ever checked it out, maybe after he retired.

WHAT DIDN’T I LIKE:

1. I said earlier that the limited nature of the war is a good thing about the structure of this book, and it’s true, but I do admit to some frustration about how little we find out about what’s going on in Africa and Asia and South America, or even the rest of the Warsaw Pact. It never feels truly like a “World” War III, and I think that’s intentional, and the correct decision, but it still bugs me.
2. Ok, so the plot doesn’t actually technically make any sense? The whole inciting incident is that a terrorist attack destroys a major Soviet oil refinery in Nizhnevartovsk, which threatens to collapse the Soviet economy, so the Politburo decides that it needs to invade the Persian Gulf and steal the oil there, but they know that will lead to war with NATO, so they decide that first they have to destroy NATO as a political and military force. That’s a bad plan, and it doesn’t make any sense, and to be fair, that’s the point, it’s supposed to be a desperate plan hatched by foolish men based on incorrect information. But I mean, c’mon, it really doesn’t make any sense.
3. I think the only female character in the whole book is Vigdis, a pregnant Icelandic teenager who gets raped by Russian paratroopers and rescued by some Americans. This isn’t great, but also, given how Tom Clancy usually writes women, it’s probably for the best. (Ed. Note: I forgot about Amy “Buns” Nakamura, the USAF’s first Space Ace! She’s pretty great).

WILL YOU LIKE IT:

Red Storm Rising is the classic example of a “dad book”, and it should probably tell you a lot about me that I first read it when I was in middle school, and that my original copy literally fell apart while I was rereading it recently. It’s a techno thriller, without a lot of subtlety or hidden depths, just trying to tell a good story and immerse you in a world. But it does a really good job of it! If you enjoy military science fiction, or other similar genres, you’ll enjoy this. If you’re the kind of the person who always likes the scene when the enemy bombers launch X number of missiles from Y distance and they’re proceeding at Z speed but your fleet only has X number of defensive turrets and each one can only engage Z targets at a time–you’ll enjoy this. If you enjoy Cold War fiction in general, I think you’ll enjoy it. It really captures the feeling of being a “realistic” look at how the Cold War could have gone Hot, and it’s easy to read as alternate history. And if you’ve read some of Tom Clancy’s other books and somehow missed this one, well, you should check it out, because it’s about as good as this particular genre can get.

This is the third part of an alternate history project I’ve been working on (and off) for a while now, based on the very simple premise of: What if America was Really Big? It’s gotten a little lot bit out of hand since. I’ve posted about it a little bit before, but I think I finally have enough to put together some longer posts–currently planned as three four, but we’ll see. The conceit is that the United Kingdom is occupied by Nazi Germany in WWII, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement lasts until 1944, with America remaining neutral until it has an overwhelming military advantage, and thus emerging as the world’s sole hegemonic power. Like several of my worldbuilding projects here, I do want to give credit to Double Victory, a very cool alternate history project by a friend of mine, that ended up influencing this in several different ways.

Previous Entries: Part One, Part Two

Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty: 1980-1984

“I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service–I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.” – President Richard Nixon, July 4th, 1981

“The United States Senate is not a lapdog, or a donkey to be led placidly about on a string. We’ll go where the evidence takes us, sir, and we don’t intend to be bullied about that. Let the American people judge if we have done well.” – Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, October 22nd, 1981

That President Nixon’s third term of office would end in impeachment, disgrace, and the total collapse of his political party could not have predicted by anybody upon his election in 1980. And yet, the seeds of disaster had been sown long before, and were already beginning to flower at the time of his inauguration. Ironically, it was one of the President’s most prized political initiatives that would lead to disaster—the Joint Congressional Committee on Civil Society, established by the new Moral Majority congressional leadership in 1973 to investigate DUP corruption, crony capitalism, and influence-buying. The Democratic coalition had always been held together by patronage politics and communal bargaining, and out of power for the first time since 1933, this left them stunningly vulnerable. Televised hearings trumped testimony revealing how “the sausage” of politics had been made; and revelations such as that of the DUP’s collusion with union leadership and Mexican chambers of commerce to suppress activism and business competition were a devastating blow to Democratic hopes of revival, and did much to shatter their coalition of interest groups and stakeholders.

The JCCSC, following on the heels of the Romney Commission of 1970-1971, led to an unprecedented boom in investigations, from both press and government, as the compromises underlying forty years of Democratic rule unraveled. Much of this, of course, rebounded to the benefit of Nixon and the Moral Majority, who were able to present themselves as a “new broom”, sweeping out the trash. But for a president as ruthless and ambitious as Richard Nixon, this sort of fanatical transparency and muckraking could only ever be an uneasy ally. As would prove with the Church Committee, established in 1977.

The Church Committee was a direct outgrowth of investigations launched by the JCCSC, which had revealed extensive blurring of the lines between DUP and government resources, personnel, and objectives across multiple Administrations. As part of this, it had become clear that the CIA had been involved in domestic operations aimed at American citizens and located on American soil. Allegations of CIA assassinations against IRA and Royalist sympathizers and funders in Boston and London could not be proven, but President Castro’s authorization of Operation CHAOS following the Kennedy Assassination of 1968 was, and evidence revealing CIA complicity in the Iran coup of 1953 that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The result was the Church Committee, established by the Senate in order to conduct a thorough audit of US intelligence operations and methods.

That Senator Frank Church of Idaho, a Progressive Democrat, agreed to lead the Committee was seen as a coup by the Nixon Administration, further splintering the opposition and gaining a bipartisan patina for the initiative. But as Church and his colleagues dug further and further, the White House began to feel like they’d made a mistake.

All the President’s Men:

The revelation of CIA involvement in the drug trade, which it was using to finance many of its covert operations, was initially trumpeted by the Nixon Administration as yet more proof of the corruption of its political opponents. A series of high-profile dismissals and trials in 1979-1980 helped propel Nixon to his third term victory, and yet the headlines obscured the very clear fact that this pattern of behavior had continued well into Nixon’s term of office. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, testifying before the Church Committee in October 1980, admitted the connections between US intelligence and Laotian and Vietnamese drug cartels operating in the Golden Triangle as part of the ongoing Indochina War, but without further details, the story seemed to go nowhere.

In early 1981, however, the investigators of the Church Committee launched another sally; this time armed and equipped with testimony from an anonymous source within the FBI of money flowing from the overseas covert budgets into domestic political activities. Newly-inaugurated President Nixon found himself bombarded with questions about campaign finance violations and commingling of funds, much to his aggravation, but there was little proof of wrongdoing–no “smoking gun”–until a Washington Post story in March revealed that senate investigators had traced a direct line of credit from an FBI black account to the so-called “Watergate conspirators”.

The attempted burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate Complex had been discovered in August 1980, when a security guard discovered the break-in and summoned the police, leading to the arrest of five men. Allegations of Nixon’s complicity had been liberally thrown about by the Muskie Campaign, but too little avail, lacking evidence. But documents published that year seemed to show that both E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were still on the payroll as FBI employees, and had access to government data and resources. Both men–who had plead guilty in return for suspended sentences–found themselves subpoenaed by the Church Committee. A frustrated Nixon, hoping to use his unprecedented mandate to finally push through an end to the Indochina War and an overhaul of the Federal civil service, found himself bogged down in a series of mounting scandals that seemed without end. It was becoming inarguable that both campaign funds and money from the Federal treasury had been used improperly by the Administration, but lack of a clear connection to the Oval Office continued to stymie any clear conclusion. But the relentless tempo of hearings and investigations enraged the president and his subordinates, and they took increasingly drastic steps in order to try and reassert their authority. This proved to be a major error.

Nixon saw himself as a figure of world-historical importance, and the sole reason that the conservative coalition had been able to retake the White House after fifty years in the wilderness. He viewed the Moral Majority as his personal fiefdom, a view that many of its leaders, who had long careers in politics predating his, found intolerable. In October 1981, Attorney General John N. Mitchell began a campaign of pressure against his ostensible allies on the Church Committee, attempting to shut down the investigation. In doing so, he made a series of wildly damaging allegations and admissions in private conversations; claiming that the Watergate break-in had been a formally-sanctioned operation of the FBI, that the Senate had no authority to intervene in the President’s exclusive purview over matters of national security, and that continuing to pursue this amounted to treason. It was a catastrophic misstep, enraging several key senators–most notably Barry Goldwater of Arizona–whose votes were essential. Goldwater had been the American Union presidential candidate in 1960, and a senator for decades. He saw this as absolutely outrageous power-grab by the executive branch, and a profound insult. An open vote on dissolving the Committee was forced on November 9th, 1981, and failed 12-3, and the content of Mitchell’s claims were swiftly leaked to the press. Mitchell was forced to resign, due to the public outrage, but the damage had been done, especially to the White House’s relationship with Congress.

In an effort to contain the damage, the new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, agreed to appoint a special prosecutor in December. The situation seemed to fade out of the news in the new year, and the White House hoped that Leon Jaworski would be able to put a conclusive end to what the president’s loyalists called “an open-ended witch hunt”. Meanwhile, international crises took center stage throughout January and February of 1982. The outbreak of war between the United Arab Republic and the Islamic Republic of Iran sent shock waves throughout the global oil market, the ongoing quagmire of the Indochina War was spilling over into the Malaysian Union, where tensions between the Malaysian majority and the large Chinese minority were beginning to rise to the level of incipient civil war, and in the United Nations Trust Territories of Westphalia & the Rhineland and Eastern Siberia popular protest movements against US rule had begun to take shape, known respectively as Freiheit and Glasnost. To Nixon, these challenges to US world hegemony were a direct consequence of the challenges to his domestic authority, and even many of his closest allies began to grow concerned at what they saw as the president’s growing paranoia and fury. Nixon was undoubtedly a brilliant and ruthless political operator, but it was becoming clear that his ambition and arrogance were simply incapable of grappling with setbacks, or a situation that he did not control entirely.

In April 1982, the special prosecutor’s office attempted to subpoena the records of Nixon’s private White House tape recordings, and all hell broke loose.

Fall From Grace:

On April 12th, 1982, Jaworski demanded that the White House turn over recordings of Nixon’s Oval Office recordings, in response to extensive testimony from cooperating witnesses that the president had been directly involved in most–if not all–of the abuses of power and illegal activities that the investigations thus far had uncovered. Nixon refused, asserting executive privilege, and the absolute immunity under Article II of the Constitution to take actions “necessary for national security”. The lawsuit quickly escalated, and it was clear that this was now a test case, establishing the limits of presidential power. The irony had been noted, of course, by many observers, that Nixon was now asserting a claim to personal power that dwarfed any of his DUP predecessors whom he had defeated with charges of corruption and autocracy.

On June 22nd, an emergency and expedited hearing of the Supreme Court handed down its verdict in United States v. Nixon, ruling 9-0 that the special prosecutor’s office had the right to subpoena the recordings, and that executive power could not protect against investigations into “high crimes and misdemeanors”. In response, President Nixon dissolved the special prosecutor’s office entirely three days later, and fired most of the leadership of the Justice Department when they objected.

It was a blatant and unmistakable power-grab, a slap in the face to the judiciary, and it shocked even many of his remaining loyalists. Nixon’s press conference the following day, where he accused Jaworski of being a foreign agent, and ranted about the treason of the Supreme Court, did nothing to help his case, and led to widespread public and private discussion of his alcoholism. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger reportedly begged him not to do it, and quietly left his role in the Administration a few weeks later, and significant defections began to roil the Moral Majority. Governor Ronald Reagan of California, often seen as Nixon’s natural successor, condemned the move, as did Senator Miguel de la Madrid of Colima, one of the key power-brokers who’d helped assure Nixon’s inroads into traditional DUP territory south of the Rio Grande. For many members of Nixon’s coalition, the president was increasingly a liability, one who threatened their own parochial interests and coalitions. Within a week, the Senate had voted along bipartisan lines to create a Special Oversight Committee, chaired by Senator Goldwater, with power to investigate the possibility of impeachment.

On July 3rd, the Washington Post published a blockbuster new series of leaks from their source in the FBI, alleging that agents loyal the president had secretly been preparing arrest warrants against several key members of the Special Oversight Committee, including Goldwater and Ted Kennedy. Director Alexander Haig of the FBI testified under oath that there was no truth to these allegations–only for the Post to release unredacted and unedited copies of the proposed indictments, as well as memos from the White House discussing the possibility of invoking martial law. Haig was forced to resign, and mid-July saw the infamous “Rubicon Hearings”, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of Andrews Air Force Base and Fort Meade forced to testify on live television that they would not follow any illegal orders, or take action against the civilian government. By now, rumors that Nixon had suffered a mental breakdown had become widespread, and Moral Majority leadership had almost entirely deserted him. Nixon’s reconstruction of the American Right after four decades in the wilderness had been a monumental achievement, but he had done it by building alliances and bridges between the existing factions of the conservative movement. In his arrogance, he had assumed that this made him indispensable. It did not. Party elders like Goldwater and Malcolm Fraser had their own followings, their own agendas, and were in no way willing to see themselves sacrificed.

On July 23rd, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Richard Nixon, charging him with obstruction of justice, contempt of Congress, abuse of power, tax fraud, perjury, and financial misconduct, on a vote of 389-254. As preparations for a trial in the Senate began, and it became unavoidable how few allies he had left, Nixon finally bowed to the inevitable. On August 9th, 1982, only two years after winning his landslide third term victory, Nixon became the first American president to resign from office.

First as Tragedy, Again as Farce:

Nixon had chosen Spiro Agnew as his vice president in 1980 specifically because he was seen as a nonentity who would not threaten the president’s power. And indeed, Agnew had been notably silent during the collapse of the Nixon Administration. This, however, was not generally considered a good attitude in a chief executive. With Nixon’s resignation, Moral Majority leadership in Congress–most notably Speaker of the House Gerald Ford and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole–hoped that they could end the crisis, and maintain control of the country, using Agnew as a figurehead, but the vice president was a deeply unpopular figure, indelibly associated with the Nixon Administration. His pardon of Richard Nixon in September 1982, which was intended to put the matter firmly to rest, and allow the country to move forward, only fanned the fury of opposition, and in the midterm elections that November, the Moral Majority suffered a stunning defeat, losing the majority in both houses of Congress.

The national Democratic Unity Platform had, of course, collapsed entirely after the landslide defeat of 1980, but progressive and liberal organizations remained strong in much of the country, and in 1982 they won across the board under a variety of regional party affiliations and names; the New Democratic Party, the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, the Commonwealth League, the Partido Socialista Liberal, and dozens of independent progressives and reformers. Once elected, a coalition known as the Reconstruction Caucus was formed, under the loose guidance of Speaker of the House Pierre Trudeau, determined to reassert democratic power after a decade of defeats.

Agnew had all of Nixon’s amorality and ambition, and very little of his intelligence or charisma. Government slammed into total deadlock almost immediately, as Trudeau attempted to assert an almost parliamentary form of government, while Agnew dug in his heels. His veto of the 1982 budget plunged the country into a prolonged fiscal crisis throughout the winter of 1982-1983, until elements of his own party defected to override him, and only a handful of cabinet secretaries were confirmed, Worse, it soon became clear that the embarrassing ethics investigations he was already facing were far more serious than had been publicly known–including allegations of tax fraud, bribery, and extortion, and an elaborate conspiracy to line his own pockets, run out of the vice president’s office. In one of the few successful compromises brokered, Agnew agreed to appoint Liberal Republican Jacob Javits as his own vice president, in a major concession to the liberal opposition, but many saw this situation as untenable.

The paralysis of the government, however, was having a serious affect on foreign affairs. That spring, Israel launched its ‘Passover Offensive’ into Palestine and Sinai, joining the Iranian-Arab War in coalition with the Islamic Republic, and turning the conflict into a major regional conflagration that spread into the Gulf of Hormuz and the Mediterranean. A United Nations member-state was now engaged in a conventional war with a regional power, and the Security Council seemed powerless to assert its authority. Simultaneously, US authority in Southeast Asia and Indochina began to inexorably retreat. In Thailand, the Royalist government backed by the US reached a ceasefire with the Emergency Military Government in April, and withdrew its support from the United Nations coalition. US and Vietnamese forces withdrew from much of Laos shortly thereafter, as the various regional proxies allied to Washington DC increasingly saw their patron as a lost cause. Emboldened by US weakness, the Republic of China Navy began to press forward aggressively, patrolling in contest waters near the Philippines, laying claim to several contest islets in the South China Sea, and threatening a blockade of Singapore.

On June 7th, elements of the Malaysian military, allied with the local branch of the Kuomintang, overthrew the government in Kuala Lumpur in what became known as the ‘Pembebasan Kebangsaan‘, the ‘National Liberation’. The new regime withdrew from the United Nations and expelled US military forces from the country, but at the same time, Northern Borneo refused to recognize their authority, and requested US assistance in defending themselves. The Defense Department moved to a state of DEFCON-2, and ordered nuclear assets readied for possible deployment, as the entire edifice of American hegemony in Southeast Asia seemed on the verge of implosion.

At home, Agnew’s political position continued to disintegrate. Despite his manifest incompetencies, there was deep reluctance on both sides of aisle of Congress to attempt another impeachment, and fear that it would destabilize the entire political system. But the litany of foreign disasters had robbed him of most remaining political support, and the drumbeat of revelations–both about the depth of his corruption and his involvement in the Nixon Administration’s crimes–had made it impossible for him to remain in office. Starting in August, a year after he took the oath of office, congressional leaders began pressuring for his resignation. More stubborn than Nixon, less attuned to political realities, more spiteful, and less interested in his historical legacy, Agnew made them do it the hard way. But when the senate voted to convict him 153-72 on October 10th, 1983, it was almost an anticlimax.

“Our Long, National Nightmare is Over”

Jacob Javits was the second Liberal Republican to hold the office of presidency, and under very similar circumstances to his predecessor, Earl Warren. He had inherited the position, chosen as a balancing act of unite the country, and governed primarily as a placeholder. The retired senator was seventy-eight when he was sworn in, making him the oldest president in US history, and he only had a single remaining year of Nixon’s original term to serve. Nobody thought he would run for reelection, and he spent his tenure operating in a sort of default coalition government with congressional liberals, overseeing the various investigations and commissions digging into the Nixon and Agnew Administrations (over a hundred people would eventually be indicted, including Spiro Agnew himself), and attempting to restaff the battered and paralyzed agencies of the Federal government after three years of chaos and neglect.

The Javits Administration was an interlude, a pause for breath, as America took a step back and tried to take stock of the tumultuous political developments that had shaken the Republic. But the elderly New York statesman could not chart a path forward for the United States. That would be up to the next generation of politicians, already sensing their opportunity.

Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken: 1984-1988

“Humility, I think, can be something salutary for a man–and perhaps for a nation as well. It can be a bitter lesson to learn, and a hard one. It’s painful to come face to face with our frailty, our failings, our limitations. But God doesn’t ask us to be perfect, my friends. God just tells us to keep trying, and that He’ll never give us a burden too heavy for us to bear. Our republic isn’t perfect, either, though we strive to bring it closer each day, and for all the might and power we’ve amassed, perhaps it’s for the best that we’ve learned our own limitations. We like to say that America can be a city on a hill, an icon and an inspiration for our friends around the globe. Well, I still think that’s true. But I hope what you learn is that we’re all human. We’re all mortal, and sometimes one can only remember the words of Job–the Lord givith and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” – President Jimmy Carter, address to the United Nations General Assembly, April 9th, 1985

You had to go back to 1860 to find a parallel for the election of 1984, or perhaps all the way to 1824. There had been several times in modern American political history where a major political coalition had fractured, but not in living memory had anyone witnessed an election like this one, in which both major parties had totally fallen apart, and the field was totally open.

The humiliating catastrophe of Nixon and Agnew had gutted the Moral Majority, though Governor Ronald Reagan of California would be nominated by a rump faction of the party. Other conservatives, disillusioned by the so-called “Sacramento Mafia”, rallied to former Secretary of National Security George H. W. Bush, running on the ballot line of the newly-formed Freedom Party, while Edward Heath ran as an Independent Conservative. Meanwhile, the Liberal Republican Party, revitalized by their unexpected capture of the White House, nominated John B. Anderson, after not contesting the presidency in two decades.

The liberals seemed to be in no better position. Former President Fidel Castro launched a comeback bid at the head of his Partido Socialista Liberal, while Ted Kennedy, the DUP presidential nominee in 1976, ran simply as a Democrat. But it was not to these veterans of the tumultuous years of the 1960s-1970s that voters turned to, but instead to a standard-bearer for the modern United States, who seemed to promise a genuine break from the past. Jimmy Carter wasn’t exactly a neophyte–a veteran of the 1947-1949 European Campaigns against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, governor of Georgia from 1975 to 1983–but he had little visibility in national politics, or involvement in the collapse of the DUP and the fall of the Nixon-Agnew Administrations. Carter was part of the ‘New South‘, the post-desegregation governors who’d taken office with a commitment to moving forward and promoting racial unity and modernization. Carter was a deeply and openly pious man, dedicated to government reform and reorganization. He’d been one of the primary organizers of the New Democratic Party in 1981-1982, and his sincerity and outsider status galvanized voters. People wanted somebody new, and they wanted somebody who seemed like they could sweep with a new broom to rebuild trust in the system, and Carter fit the bill.

Carter’s popularity rose throughout 1984, and his position was solidified when he chose Pierre Trudeau as his running mate, cementing the loyalty of several major liberal factions. In November, Carter won only 42% of the popular vote, given the divided field, but his margin in the electoral college was commanding, and the following January, a Democrat was elected to the White House for the first time since John F. Kennedy in 1968.

Building Back Better:

Despite his undeniable skill at campaigning, Carter’s Administration found itself in an unenviable position, domestically. Though the NDP had working majorities in both Houses of Congress, they were still loose coalitions, dependent on independent representatives and splinter parties with their own leadership, and it soon became clear that Carter’s ability to manage his coalition partners was limited, at best. His relationship with senior congressional leadership soured, and his own conservative inclinations on deregulation and budget reform put him in direct conflict with the liberal and progressive caucuses, stymieing his ambitious agenda. Throughout Carter’s first term in office, his main legislative accomplishments were limited to broadly-popular post-Nixon reforms of the presidency, including the Freedom of Information Act (1985), Inspector General Act (1985) and the National Emergencies Act (1987), as well as the creation of the Federal Ombudsman Office as a Cabinet-level independent agency. He also presided over the ratification of the 26th Amendment, limiting future presidents to two terms of office, though Congress had first passed that during the Javits Administration. Instead, Carter dedicated the bulk of his efforts to foreign affairs, and to repairing the battered world position of the United States of America.

The US had emerged from World War II as the formal hegemon and protector of the international order, and the events of the last decade had shaken that certainty immensely. American leadership was dependent upon an assurance of American stability and power that could no longer be entirely taken for granted, and regional rivals were emboldened and ascendant everywhere. Still, US economic domination was unchallenged, and the fact of the matter was that there was simply no alternate for most nations to the United Nations. As president, Carter set himself the goal of a “reset” in American relations, breaking away from both the arrogant colonialist mindset of the DUP and Nixon’s cynical maneuverings for advantage, proclaiming a ‘New Era’ in global affairs in preparation for the new millennium. In service to this, Carter barnstormed across the world at a pace no previous president had managed, speaking in a dozen countries over his first term, and brokering a series of world-historical diplomatic agreements as he and his team of advisors worked tirelessly to put out the brushfires that had caught alight during America’s absence.

Out of the Heart of Darkness:

In Asia, the Indochina War, raging since 1976, was finally brought to a close, as Carter acknowledged the inevitable. The loss of US support from Malaya, Thailand, and the Lao People’s Revolutionary Front in 1983 had dealt a death blow to any hope of maintaining United Nations hegemony in the region without a commitment to total mobilization against the Republic of China and the Zìqiáng Yùndòng that no US administration was willing to countenance. Fighting still continued, however, in Cambodia and along the Vietnamese frontiers, and the US Special Administration Zones of Singapore and Hong Kong had been placed under a formal state of siege. Elements of the US Navy and the ROC-N exchanged fire on several occasions–in the Spratly Islands on July 9th, 1983, off Cam Ranh Bay on November 2nd and November 14th, 1983, and in the Pearl River estuary on February 22nd, 1984–and a Chinese military transport plane was shot down by US fighters when it entered Philippines airspace on March 3rd.

Following his inauguration, President Carter moved quickly to establish a ceasefire, opening up talks directly with Nanjing for the first time since 1977. The United Nations peacekeeping resolution of 1976 was withdrawn by the Security Council, and both sides began drawing down their troops. In May 1985, a series of talks mediated by the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia resulted in the Belgrade Accords, in which both powers pledged to respect the independence and autonomy of each other, and each other’s allies. Americans were happy to see the unpopular war–fought far away for reasons few had ever understood–being brought to a close, and for the UN Expeditionary Force to be withdrawn. But the price was high, and the most humiliating reversal of American power since WWII. Washington was forced to recognize the membership of Democratic Kampuchea, the Republic of Thailand, the Union of Malaya, and the Kingdom of Laos in the Zìqiáng Yùndòng, a monumental collapse of United Nations influence and power in Southeast Asia, even as the Republic of China reciprocated by promising to respect the borders of the Republic of Vietnam and the independence of the newly-declared Sarawak Republic. Critics on the right, and even within the former DUP wing of American politics were furious. Even those who had paid little attention to the war while it was happening now found time to denounce Carter for ending it.

The view of the Carter Administration was that deescalation and détente with the Republic of China would provide far more benefit to the United States than drawing lines on a map, and there was evidence that they were correct. In the Hong Kong Memorandum of 1985, both powers agreed to a substantial demilitarization of the South China Sea, and in 1987 the two powers ratified the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. The liberalization of the Chinese economy, and its openness to United States and allied corporations, which had begun following the death of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, would continue. But at the time, it was a substantial blow to the president’s popularity.

Other aspects of Carter’s diplomatic offensive (sometimes derided as an “apology tour”) were similarly contentious, especially as he began loosening the reigns on America’s informal empire. In October 1985, he became the first sitting US president to visit the United Nations Trust Territory of Eastern Siberia, where he signed the Omsk Memorandum, beginning the process of exploring the establishment of an independent Siberian state. In February 1986, he signed the Frankfurt Protocol with representatives from the German Democratic Federal Republic and the United Nations Trust Territory of Westphalia & the Rhineland, paving the way for the referendums the following year that would see Bremen and Hamburg retroceded to the DDBR. In 1990, he helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, bringing an end to the much of the endemic violence simmering there since the 1960s. Opponents saw this as weakness, and a surrender of America’s pride. Carter saw it as a necessary renegotiation of the international contract, one that would create a more lasting and stable system. And as the other major international crisis of his administration showed, his inclinations were not always so pacifistic.

“Death Machines Were Rumbling/Over the Ground Where Jesus Stood”

Early in 1982, the United Arab Republic and the Islamic Republic of Iran had declared war on each other after several escalating months of border clashes and dueling ultimatums. The exact chain of causality remains murky; the pan-Arab nationalist government in Damascus hoped to take advantage of the chaos of post-revolutionary Iran to annex the majority-Arab Khuzestan province, while Tehran reportedly sought foreign conflict to unite a divided population. The result was bloody stalemate, with neither side able to gain a decisive advantage. So it might have continued, until a peace of exhaustion, if not for the entrance of the State of Israel into the war in March 1983.

Israel had become independent in 1952, with US and UN backing, after winning an ugly war against both the native Palestinian population and the surrounding Arab states. Since then, the Jewish state had been locked into a regional cold war of its own, with the United Arab Republic that bordered it on all sides. Violent clashes erupted on more than one occasion–November 1954, December 1958, February 1959, June 1959, March-April 1966, October 1973, August-September 1977–but US support for Israel made open warfare with the UAR impossible, for either Gamal Abdel Nasser or his Israeli opponents. Much of the Israeli right, however, remained deeply unsatisfied with the borders they’d secured in 1952, and resentful of their dependence on US diplomatic support. In 1983, Prime Minister Menachem Begin saw his chance to secure Israeli regional hegemony of their own, and launched a preemptive attack against the UAR.

The United Arab Republic, meanwhile, was suffering from severe problems of their own. President Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj did not have the authority or charisma that Nasser had, and his secular developmentalist policies were running into religious and regional conflict, as well as being sapped by endemic corruption. Throughout 1983 the regime was brought to the breaking point by war on multiple fronts; as Iranian troops fought their ways towards the Euphrates, and Israeli soldiers secured control of Amman and the East Bank of the Suez Canal, while they drove into the suburbs of Damascus. But the Tehran-Tel Aviv Alliance was suffering from its own problems as well. The naval war in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean had battered both their economies, neither power was set up to support an extended war of attrition, and efforts to negotiate a favorable peace with the UAR fell on deaf ears. The Arab leadership may have wanted to sue for terms by this point, but public opinion made that impossible. The “Arab Street” already saw the government as weak, and were increasingly turning to alternatives to Pan-Arab secular nationalism–such as Wahhabism and other Islamist revivals.

Carter’s election in 1984 brought an end to the benign indifference of Washington DC, and the United Nations began pressuring for a ceasefire and peace on the terms of status quo ante bellum. The Israeli occupation zone in Syria and the Transjordan was increasingly under pressure from irregular and guerilla forces, a popular movement known as the ‘Intifada‘, and the mass-mobilization reserve structure of the IDF was having difficulties maintaining itself in the field long-term. Facing the disintegration of their position, the Israeli Security Cabinet resorted to desperate measures: Operation Haziz, a ‘escalate-to-deescalate’ strategy designed to shock their opponents into surrender. On July 8th, 1986, they dropped a nuclear bomb on Damascus.

This was the first time a strategic nuclear weapon had been used since the destruction of Minsk in 1948–though the IDF and its apologists made reference to the copious use of tactical atomic artillery by the US during the European Intervention–and it is hard to overstate the impact it made on international opinion and global affairs. Rather than intimidating the enemies of Israel, it whipped them into a fury, and alienated most of their allies. Ironically, Haziz was effectively the death blow to the United Arab Republic, which did not survive the strain, but Israel soon found that the popular, often-religiously motivated opposition that replaced it even harder to deal with. Terrorism, riots, and insurgency swept through the occupied zones, and the IDF found itself falling back, as their supply lines collapsed under international and United Nations sanctions.

By the spring of 1987, the Israeli position was untenable, and Tel Aviv threw itself on the mercy of Washington DC. Prime Minister Begin resigned, and the new National Unity government requested support. They got it–by November, three Marine Expeditionary Units and the 101st Airborne Division had been deployed to backstop the IDF and defend Jewish communities from reprisals–but the price was severe, as the Carter Administration imposed strict oversight on their recalcitrant client state, determined to put an end to any more Israeli adventurism. The Israeli nuclear program was, of course, dismantled, but the State of Israel was also forced to recognize the independence of a Palestinian State in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Galilee. In return for this they received a permanent US military presence, necessary to defend against the violent unrest that now raged throughout the former UAR.

It would take another decade for the dust to settle, and for the consequences of the Middle Eastern War and the collapse of the UAR to become fully clear, but the main impact amounted to a major advance of US influence and presence in the region. Many of the successor states of the United Arab Republic–the Transjordan Republic, the Republic of Egypt, the State of Palestine, and the Republic of Baghdad–sought shelter beneath the wings of the United Nation from the threat of the Islamist renaissance unleashed by the implosion of Nasser’s dreams, and especially from the revanchism of the Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant, which styled itself as the United Republic’s legitimate successor. A new UN regional organization was created in 1988, the Eastern Mediterranean Partnership, and the Carter Administration found itself committed to a new security commitment of indefinite length. A “reset” in international relations clearly did not mean the abandonment of the American Empire.

Towards the New Millennium:

Carter’s ambitious diplomatic program was well-timed, and necessary. The world-system that Roosevelt and Marshall had built decades before was simply not capable of managing the crisis and confusion of modernity, and the United States could no longer simply dictate to its allies from afar, like Jove upon Mount Olympus. Carter proved that the USA, even without the dominant political structures of the DUP or Nixon’s machine, could still exercise influence and power, and serve as a key source of global stability, something that was becoming quickly more important, as the foundations of the 1950s began to crumble.

The Indochina and Middle Eastern Wars had been one manifestation of that dynamic, as regional power blocs jostled for position, but an even more existential crisis was already beginning to unfold in Europe, where the Confédértion États Souverains was grappling with the most severe crisis it had faced in decades.

President Charles de Gaulle had died in 1970, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco had passed away in 1975, leaving Europe entirely in the hands of a new generation. Like their predecessors, they believed in the mission of European autonomy and sovereignty, in preserving their spheres of colonial control aboard, and in maintaining a cordon sanitaire against American economic and cultural influence, but it was getting harder and harder to do. Starved of competition and investment by autarkic controls, the French, Spanish, and Italian economies languished, dominated by corrupt and inefficient government-backed firms with little incentive to innovate. Low-level bush wars smoldered throughout their remaining African colonies, and the new upcoming generation seemed to have little interest in the dreams of de Gaulle. They wanted Hollywood and rock n’ roll, not lectures on civic responsibility and opera. It was a potent brew, and even during Carter’s first term, as he remained fixated further afield, it was beginning to come to a head.

And The Wall Came Tumbling Down: 1988-1996

“It is time–and long past time–for Europa to put aside her tarnished baubles of past glories, the tattered robes of ill-fitting empire. It is time to stop sacrificing our children on the altars of our grandfather’s dreams. Put up the blinds! Tear open the curtains, let the daylight floor into our musty rooms, and shine upon the dust and detritus of half-a-hundred years of denial. Blink bleary eyes at the blinding light of the 21st century, which even now crests upon the horizon. My friends, my brothers, my sisters, it is time for Europe to rejoin the ranks of Civilization.” – Umberto Eco, exiled Italian philosopher, novelist, and political activist, November 14th, 1991

“I think Americans are tired of being lectured–of being bossed around by party bureaucrats and apparatchiks, and given sermons on what they can and cannot do. I think the American people are ready for someone who’s willing to get out of the way, and let them show us just what they can do when nobody’s holding them back.” – President Marget Thatcher, January 28th, 1992

President Carter and Vice President Trudeau stood for reelection in 1988, and were swept to a relatively easy victory. Much of Carter’s foreign policy had been unpopular, but the economy remained stable, and there was still a great deal of desire for stability after the Nixon and Agnew Administrations. Against him ran the Australian conservative leader Malcolm Fraser, former member of the House of Representatives and Governor of Victoria, who had been nominated as a compromise candidate by the still-recoalescing American Right, under the banner of the Unionist Coalition, a fragile alliance of most of the major fragments of the Moral Majority, put together at a summit meeting in London in 1987. Carter won 52% of the vote, and comfortable margin in the electoral college, but the domination of his opposition by the geographical “fringe” of the United States was an interesting sign of things to come.

Much like his first term, Carter was limited in his reach by his poor relations with NDP party leadership, and his dependence on smaller parties and independents for control of the senate. The slide of the US economy into recession by 1990 did not help matters, nor did his insistence on budgetary austerity to combat the fiscal crisis. But again, foreign affairs continued to dominate his attention, as the US found itself increasingly embroiled in Western Europe, grappling with the potential of a total collapse of the French government and the Confédértion États Souverains.

The Italian Thaw:

In the 1989 Italian elections, the ruling Democrazia Cristiana, the dominant force in the Kingdom of Italy since the arrest of Mussolini and the dissolution of the Partito Nazionale Fascista in 1948, suffered a shocking defeat to the Partito Comunista Italiano, losing their majority in the Chamber of Deputies for the first time since 1953. Italy was not a formally one-party state, but the Kingdom remained highly authoritarian–elections were monitored by the Carabinieri and Military Intelligence Service, candidates who spoke against “the Basic Laws and Values of Christian and Democratic Italy” were subject to arrest, and the appointed Council of State had sweeping oversight powers, even over the Prime Minister and Parliament. The 1989 elections had been marred by violence, riots, and unrest, especially in Milan, Turin, and the traditional heartland of the Italian Left, and resulted in a result too obvious to set aside. Massimo D’Alema became Prime Minister, and almost immediately launched into a direct conflict with the traditional Italian establishment and King Victor Emmanuel IV.

D’Alema and the PCI had an ambitious agenda; ending Italian involvement in the African Colonial Wars, investigating and dismantling the corruption and authoritarianism of the Italian ruling class, and (paradoxically perhaps) opening up the state-supported monopolies and cartels to competition and investment from outside the “cerchio d’oro” of favored nobles and politicians. This ran headlong into the opposition of the monarchy and the Council of State, and the result reminded many of the infamous Biennio Rosso of 1919-1920, as strikes proliferated, and the government ground to a halt. That earlier explosion of anarchy had resulted in the fascist March on Rome, but this time, their descendants were already there–old, fat, and tired, presiding over a century of decay and decline. 1990 and 1991 witnessed an escalating political conflict, as the royalists and Christian Democrat apparatchiks grimly tried to hold onto power in the face of mass opposition. The arrest and trial of D’Alema in March 1991 proved an inflection point when a judge ordered the Prime Minister released and ruled the charges “spurious and illegal”, and key military units refused to obey orders to impose martial law in the capitol without the signature of the Prime Minster. King Victor Emmanuel IV was forced to dismiss nine members of the Council of State, and allow Parliament to appoint its own majority.

New rounds of elections, held without state interference for the first time in decades, swept Christian Democracy from power, and delivered a massive new coalition of communists, liberals, and reformist conservatives into Parliament. Referendums held later that year abolished the Italian monarchy, rewrote the constitution, and formally withdrew from the Confédértion États Souverains–though by the time that was ratified by the new Italian Republic in early 1992, the question had become moot.

The Death of De Gaulle’s Dream:

The French Republic–long considered the premier power of the Confédértion–had been caught up in its own crisis, driven by the same underlying factors. There had been spasms of liberalization attempts since the détente of the Nixon Era, but Paris was still determined to hold onto its independence and autonomy in an American-led world. But that was becoming increasingly impossible. President Jeannou Lacaze attempted a compromise; economic reform paired with political crackdowns, but the restive population was no longer willing to settle for half-measures, and the economic elite simply did not trust the government to be able to follow through on its promises. Food shortages in Paris in 1990 prompted riots, and several regiments of troops earmarked for service in the Overseas Territories mutinied. The ongoing Italian crisis exacerbated this, as one of the main pillars of French hegemony in Western Europe and the Mediterranean tottered. In the spring of 1991, the French government began preparing for a military intervention in Italy to support their partner, and attempted to delay the legislative elections scheduled for latter that year. This was the last straw.

It was the worst unrest to sweep France since the May 1968 Uprising. Massive protests and demonstrations swept across Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, and other major French cities, rapidly consolidating around a manifesto and litany of demands from the Solidarity Platform: an end to the colonial wars, an end to government via emergency legislation, new elections held immediately, the release of political prisoners, the legalization of the SFIO and other banned opposition parties, and the sale or reform of state enterprises and the breakup of the cartels. Units of the Garde Nationale quickly began defecting, or refusing to follow orders to clear the streets, and Paris plunged into chaos. In July 1991, the situation became critical, as Prime Minister Jacques Chirac resigned, and publicly condemned the government. This was an unprecedented breakdown of party loyalty. Since 1955, France had ruled by a permanent coalition of the Republican Union and the National Front. Now, Chirac led almost a third of the Union’s deputies into the opposition, forming the new Union of Democrats for the Republic, and shattering the government’s majority and legitimacy. By now, it was clear that the Italian government had collapsed, and that the Confédértion as it existed could no longer survive. In August, President Lacaze opened negotiations with Chirac, hoping to formalize a transfer of power that would allow much of the Gaullist State to survive.

Chirac won the resulting elections in a landslide, forming a new moderate Republican government, and excluding the National Front. It was unclear exactly what the results of this would be–Chirac was a reformer, but also a longstanding member of the Gaullist government. Certainly, he hoped to preserve as much of France’s international position as possible. His hand, however, was forced by the December Coup, as elements of the French military attempted to size power. Hardliner leaders, mostly in the Troupes de Marine and Colonial forces, were able to seize control of Paris, and declare a new Government of National Salvation, but were met by massive protests, the refusal of most organs of state to obey their orders, and diplomatic protests from even other members of the Confédértion États Souverains, such as the Kingdom of Belgium and the Swabian Union. After only a few days, their support collapsed, and the leaders fled into exile in Spain or Switzerland. Chirac was restored to power, but the hope of a rapprochement with the Gaullists was dead, and his new coalition depended on the support of Solidarity and the moderate socialists. A withdrawal from the colonies and protectorates of the Union Française began immediately, and plans were announced for a constitutional convention and a referendum on a new, Seventh Republic.

The Confédértion would formally be dissolved at a meeting of the Secretariat in Brussels six months later, by which point the only government still standing was the Kingdom of Spain–already by then sinking into what would soon become known as the Second Spanish Civil War (1992-2003).

Enter the Iron Lady:

The United States had been taken by surprise by the sudden collapse of their continental rival. Despite French paranoia about CIA plots and infiltration, the Confédértion had always been of distinctly secondary–or even tertiary–concern to most American policymakers. The Carter Administration, still trying to stabilize the fragile new geopolitical concordances of Southeast Asia and the Middle East, now found themselves at the center of a diplomatic revolution in European affairs. Democratization of France and Italy did not automatically mean their entry into the United Nations and the US-led world order, but it was impossible not to interpret this as a major sign of support for American postwar policy, and a general public who had mostly ignored the “Cold War” with Paris and Rome was quick to celebrate. Washington DC was more cautious; the collapse of a major regional power bloc had many implications–especially in regards to the French and Italian nuclear arsenals–and US forces in Westphalia and Britain were put on alert during the December Coup and the tense days and weeks afterwards. Even more monumental were the shifts in Africa, as fifty years of rearguard colonial warfare ended overnight. In a change of pace, it was the US that found itself dragged into a series of Saharan morasses over the next year, as the African members of the United Nations pushed for aggressive action to stabilize the continent.

Economically, the opening of Western Europe to US investment after decades of trade wars and autarky was a huge boon to Wall Street and the American corporate class, and helped contribute to the general euphoria that characterized mid-1990s American culture. The political scandals and international crisis of the 1980s had given way to what seemed to many to be a total triumph of American power and society, as well as the final victory of the Second World War. Perhaps surprisingly, however, this did not rebound to the fortunes of the New Democratic Party. Americans did not want a return to the civic nationalism and paternalism of the Democratic Unity Platform, they wanted to celebrate. And the unlikely beneficiary of that attitude was the “Iron Lady” herself, Margret Thatcher.

Ineligible to run in 1992, Carter was succeeded as NDP candidate by Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, after an ugly primary campaign with Vice President Trudeau. Perhaps lingering discontent from that fissure robbed Tsongas of vital support, or perhaps Americans were just not interested in inaugurating a new DUP dynasty. But the result were a decisive victory for Governor Thatcher. Most famous for breaking the Democratic Unity Platform-Labor (DUP-L) stranglehold in Northumbrian politics, Thatcher was an seasoned politician by 1992, with several decades of experience. In recent years, she’d become a major powerbroker within the Unionist Coalition, and one of the key figures who’d negotiated its formation in 1987. Her selection of Ronald Reagan as her running mate was both a symbol of how far the old Nixonian faction had fallen–and how much influence it still retained.

Thatcher was the first woman to become president of the United States, as well as the first president to come from the British Isles, and only the second one to be born outside the pre-1942 borders of the country. An uncompromising and ruthless leader, she nevertheless managed to embody the free spirits of ’90s America, a sort of laissez-faire approach to both economics and society that few political factions had managed to convey before. Inaugurated in 1993, she was plunged directly into the chaos of post-Gaullist European politics, presiding over a landmark summit meeting with French, German, and Italian officials in Zurich in July that reaffirmed support for all sovereign borders, and arranging a major package of IMF and World Bank loans. Despite her criticisms of Carter’s “sentimental imperialism”, she declared a No Fly Zone over Catalonia and Euskadi in response to Spanish atrocities in 1994-1995, and signed legislation in 1996 clearing the way for the Siberian Independence Referendum. Domestically, she pushed through several major bundles of deregulation and fiscal reforms that Carter had advocated for, and failed, as well as serious tax cuts. The result was an economic boom, compounded by the ongoing adoption of the internet, and the ensuing dot-com bubble.

Good Times Make Weak Men:

Popular, successful, and clearly in touch with the national mood, Unionist leaders took it for granted that Thatcher’s reelection in 1996 would be an easy road. But it was not to be, as the attitude of the American people proved far more fickle than anyone had realized. Flush with wealth both physical and psychological, the US electorate seemed disinterested in stability or security, and interested in anyone who could make sweeping promises or catch their attention. The party system was still reforming after the collapse of the early 1980s, and neither the NDP or the Unionist Coalition had the strength or cohesion of their predecessors. Loose alliances still finding their footing and securing loyalties, they were both vulnerable to challenges and disruptions from outside the system. Like Carter’s heirs in 1992, Thatcher found herself quickly losing the interest of her voters.

Perhaps, as many of her allies would later allege, it was lingering sexism, and a rebellion from party officials who resented that it was a woman who’d led the Right out of the wilderness. Perhaps it was “American” chauvinism against somebody who was still, despite decades of assimilation, often considered a “foreigner”. Or perhaps she was a victim of her own success, clearing the way for an even more radical populist, one willing to denounce her in the same strident terms she’d denounced her predecessors.

Whatever the case, the result was the election of 1996, the rise of the Reform Party, and the election of Donald Trump.

TITLES: Orphans of Chaos, Fugitives of Chaos, Titans of Chaos

AUTHOR: John C. Wright

SERIES: Chronicles of Chaos

PUBLISHER: Tor Books

DATES: 2005-2007

Many years ago for Christmas, my uncle gave me a large box containing a random selection of classic science fiction books from the collection in his basement. This was probably one of the best gifts I ever received, and it introduced me to Harlan Ellison and Gene Wolfe, among other titans of the genre. It also included a series called “The Chronicles of Chaos”, by an author I’d never heard of, that I can only describe as “Percy Jackson for adults”, with all the negative and positive connotations that implies. I loved these books, and I can’t deny that they were hugely formative on how I think about science fiction and fantasy and writing. They were also deeply weird, in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable even as a child, and that learning about the author’s politics and life since has only intensified. I am not sure I can actually recommend these books, given how “problematic” they are, to use a phrase I don’t particularly like. But I am fascinated by them, and I can’t deny their influence, and I wanted to go back and try and unpack my feelings about them.

BACKGROUND:

Amelia Armstrong Windrose has never known any life but the secluded British boarding school where she and her friends were raised. She doesn’t know her birthday, or how old she is. She doesn’t know who her family is. She doesn’t know that being taught how to translate the Greek classics and calculate fifth-dimensional calculus isn’t normal, or that a school with five students and twenty teachers where nobody ever goes home is unusual. She doesn’t know that she’s not human, though she has her suspicions. She doesn’t know that she is a hostage, taken to secure a truce in an interdimensional war between the sidereal Universe and the Void, and that the fates of untold billions rest on her shoulders, that armies of incomprehensible beings stand poised to do battle if she falls. But she knows one thing–she wants to get out. And as her powers begin to awaken, it looks like she’s going to get the chance.

WHAT I LIKED:

1. At its heart, the Chronicles of Chaos is a boarding school narrative, which remains a cornerstone of YA literature for a reason. Blurbs on my copies of these books compare them to both Harry Potter and Narnia, which makes sense; both those stories are about children away from home, in an environment that offers both a level of control (which provides a structure to rebel against) as well as a degree of freedom from “real life” that is, I think, often hugely appealing to readers. For me, of course, the best comparison to probably Camp Half-Blood from The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, which interestingly enough, was published the same year as Orphans of Chaos. I wonder what was in the zeitgeist back in 2005. But Hogwarts and Camp Half-Blood are, broadly speaking, escapist fantasies, places outside the bounds of “normal life” where misfit children learn how special they are. Saint Dymphna’s School and College for Destitute Children is a prison, built to contain beings of unimaginable power, and trap them in routines and schedules and lessons and disciplines. It’s all very Foucaultian.

2. I keep describing this series as “Percy Jackson for adults” because I think it’s the best reference point that people will understand. Like the Percy Jackson series, John C. Wright posits the Greek Gods of Olympus in the modern world, hiding behind the scenes but still controlling everything. But Rick Riordan was writing a Young Adult adventure series (and a very good one), and Wright is very much not, and so the series diverge pretty drastically in tone and content. Some of that is just the level of blood and sex and Adult Themes that Wright tackles, but it happens on a more structural level too; Riodan is retelling Classical myths in the modern age, but while Wright uses them as the raw materials, he is building something totally different. When the story starts, Olympus is locked into a cold civil war. Zeus has been killed in the last war with Chaos, and Ares and Hephaestus are competing for the Throne of Heaven. The foibles and fallacies of the Olympians are not obscured or elided here, these are immensely powerful entities who do not have much concern for anything that we would recognize as “morality”. The conflict we enter here is not one that a precious teenager can solve, it is a war over the nature of existence that has been being fought for billions of years, and this is just one more front line opening up.

3. The key to what makes these books so great to me is the worldbuilding, which is remarkably deep and rich, and done with a level of complexity that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen equaled. Primarily, this revolves around what we could call “systems of magic”, something that fantasy writers and readers love to debate about. In the past, in regards to works like Lord of the Rings, I’ve discussed the value of a “soft” system, that doesn’t try and mechanize everything, or tie it down with rules. Wright takes the opposite approach, and makes it work. Of the five main characters (Amelia, Victor, Quentin, Colin, and Vanity), four of them are hostages from the “Four Houses of Chaos”, the four paradigms that make up the underlying, raw material of the primordial reality from which Saturn created the corporal and material Universe. (The fifth, Vanity, is a Phaeacian princess). They do not simply have different powers, but different worldviews, different ways of comprehending and categorizing what they see, and what they can do.

The giant table, which had taken workmen with pulleys and dollies hours to haul into place, was picked up by the sixty or seventy disembodied hands, lifted lightly into the air, and set on its side against the wall.

Quentin whispered “He is sending the animal humors and motive spirits out from his arms and forming eidolons in midair to impersonate his hands, which he moves by virtue of those humors.”

I whispered back, “We are seeing a polydimensional effect. The real creature is four-dimensional; he is merely rotating more of his body into this time-space.”

Orphans of Chaos, John C. Wright, pg. 112

Amelia is a non-Euclidean polydimensional entity from a dimension where space and time don’t exist. Quentin is a warlock, from a race of sorcerers and seers who see the material body as a curse, or a distraction at best. Colin is a shaman, a son of the King of Dreams, who can do anything he believes he can do. Victor is an automaton, a perfectly logical biological robot with the ability to self-replicate. Each one has their own sheaf of abilities, all of which fit together in a cycle of counters. Amelia’s Einsteinian relativity can defeat Victor’s Newtonian physics, which in turn can easily override Quentin’s magic spells, which can overcome the mystic powers of Colin, which in turn cancel out Amelia’s fourth-dimensional abilities. It’s the kind of series that you basically need a chart to understand, and I love it.

4. There is an ongoing debate about “magic systems”, and the kind of people who like everything spelled out with rules and regulations and laws, and those who like magic to be something genuinely incomprehensible and mystical. I think it usually depends on the kind of story you’re telling, and I think that for this story, the focus on interlocking systems of power levels and paradigms really works, because this is–at its heart–a story about claustrophobia. It’s a story about being children, and growing up, and about the insane, arbitrary rules that adults impose on you, and untangling them, and gaining mastery. It’s about deconstructing totalitarianism from the inside, and for all of those, it makes sense to create this complex mechanism of powers and abilities and attributes that our protagonists need to race against time to unpack and understand. This all becomes literalized by the Olympians themselves, who have power over Fate itself. The Gods can decree outcomes within the spheres of their competency, and events will align to bring them to fruition. By waging war on Olympus, we are waging war on destiny itself.

5. There is a genre that I don’t know the name of, but really love, where the language of hard science is used to describe elements of magic and mythology. A.A. Attanasio’s The Dragon and the Unicorn is the other main example I can think besides this series, where the rise of Arthur Pendragon is part of a war between celestial beings formed from the energy of the Big Bang. I’m tempted to call it “science fantasy”, but I think that summons up more the image of Star Wars-style sweeping space opera? Anyways, I think it’s great, and I think it always works so well because modern physics is already so impossible to comprehend that putting things in those terms almost always feels bigger and grander than the picayune imagery of Gods and Heroes, trapped on this tiny orbiting rock of Earth. In the Chronicles of Chaos, Zeus was Imperator of the Universe, all fifteen billion light-years of it, and we get glimpses of what that means—Atlantean spaceships drifting through the asteroid belt, magnetic launch tubes drilled into the crust of Mars, manned by Laestrygonians, wooden space stations orbiting Neptune, Taloi the size of mountains, bristling with rail guns and siege artillery, networks of highways drilled through hyperspace connecting the Twelve Worlds, wars that take billions of years of relativistic distortion to play out across the Outer Oceans of Vacuum. It’s a melange of genres and myths, woven together like nothing else I’ve quite seen. It makes the Universe feel massive–and also minuscule. Because in addition to seeing the Olympians’ domains and fiefdoms, we also get the story of the original Creation of the Cosmos, which ends up being the focus about which the plot revolves.

6. There are a lot of issues in these books, which I will get to, but this is the thing that made me fall in love with it, and why I’ll never be able to totally put them aside. Rick Riordan’s series neatly elided the origins and genesis of the Olympians by making them merely avatars of the idea of Western Civilization. But here, almost everything comes back to the original creation of the Universe by Saturn, which, with apologies to Douglass Adams, has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

“When Saturn rebelled against Uranus and created the world of time, of entropy and decay, he knew he would be attacked both by those he had trapped within the orbit of his creation, and by rescuers from outside–other sons of Uranus. To limit the Prelapsarians–your people–he made this world to collapse the higher dimensions into infinitesimal volumes. He needed only a fourth dimension, in order to erect a superstructure of time, space, order, and to establish universal laws of nature.”

“There is a singularity, called the Unknown, which retains the condition of time-space as it was before the lapse of reality into the Big Bang. Myriagon orbits this singularity. From the depths of its event horizon there arise, from time to time, lapses or folds in the substance of reality, which can be collapsed to form areas and conditions of time, space, matter, and dimension. Most of these vest-pocket universes are small, no more than ten light-years across or ten years old, and containing trivial mass-energy. Larger universes can be created, she told me, if a diver is willing to go closer and ever closer into the event horizon………….Saturn is a creature from the very earliest times of Myriagon, back when it was called Polygon, and only occupied two or three dimensions. He fell far more deeply toward the event horizon than any other of the Early Ones. Millions, billions, countless ages of time went by. When he emerged, he controlled an area of time-space so great, and containing a mass-energy so large, that it created its own event horizon embracing the other universes. All the tiny realms of the innocent people of Myriagon were unfolded and collapsed into his. This collapse of all life into his macroscopic universe created time and entropy. Countless people died. Cosmos was created–the established world.”

Orphans of Chaos, John C. Wright, pgs. 290-291

Of course, this is merely the Prelapsarian perspective. Other paradigms of Chaos have their own interpretations, but all agree that the material universe is an abomination, a warlord state run by insane rebels who created time and matter and entropy as weapons with which to control their subjects. It’s all extremely Gnostic. The realms of Chaos, existing outside the material continuum, have spent billions of years trying to tear it down, and the capture of the hostages who are our protagonists was a last-ditch effort by an Olympus riven by civil war to hold back to deluge. This lends a degree of complexity to the plot of the books, because despite being Chaoticists themselves, our heroes were raised on Earth, as humans. Unlike their parents, they are not so sure that they want to bring the dome of the sky crashing down in flames or put an end to the operations of all biochemical life.

7. One of the really interesting ideas present in these books is that it takes a very Neoplatonist view of religion; the fact that “Gods” exist as powerful entities with the power to create and destroy does not actually tell us anything about the idea of a “God”, as in a transcendent being, a Prime Mover, an Uncaused Cause. We met, for example, a Siren who is a devout Donatist Christian, and sees no contradiction between acknowledging that Zeus or Apollo exists, and has power, and in worshiping a hypothetical being who can offer true Salvation for sins, and a life beyond the confines of eternity. Saint Augustine makes a very similar argument in City of God, and I think it’s a very good way of maintaining genuine numinous awe in this kind of setting. Even beings who were old before the foundations of the Earth were laid still wonder about the Big Questions, and hope that they have an Eternal Soul that can be redeemed.

8. One of the small, but clever decisions that Wright makes is that the Greek Gods are rarely called by their most common names, but are instead identified by more esoteric epithets. Zeus is a name too well-known in too many contexts to inspire much fear or reverence, His Imperial Majesty Imperator the Lord Terminus is another thing entirely, and the same holds true for the rest of the pantheon. Ares is Lord Mavors, Hephaestus is Mulciber, Hermes is known as Trismegistrus, Aphrodite as Lady Cyprian, and so on and so forth. It’s a minor detail, but really helps distinguish the books for me.

9. Wright’s prose is sort of notoriously baroque; he writes with this very-consciously archaic, elaborate style with lots of repetition and digressions and elaborate metaphors. It’s ponderous, in a way that reminds me of Lovecraft more than any other writer. It’s not “good” writing in the traditional sense, but I really do think it works for this kind of story, which is itself self-consciously pretentious, and composed of layer upon layer of ideas that need to be unpacked. These are not normal people, and so it is reasonable that they do not act or speak like normal people.

WHAT DIDN’T I LIKE:

1. The series does not exactly end on a cliffhanger, but it isn’t totally resolved, either. I don’t want to spoil things too much, but I’ll say that while the immediate plot is resolved, there are a lot of questions–both personal and political–left hanging. This isn’t my favorite part of the series, but I don’t mind it as much as I might, because the scope of the conflict is so vast. This is a series about the creation and destruction of the universe, and so you can’t exactly wrap things up with a neat little bow.

2. So, the elephant in the room here is John C. Wright’s politics and personal life, which anybody who has heard of him has been waiting for me to mention. Wright is an adult convert to Roman Catholicism, and a rabidly right-wing Christian. He was deeply involved in the Rabid Puppies fiasco, he is a friend and collaborator with Theodore Beale, who is a white supremacist and a horrible person, he is deeply bigoted against LGBT people, etc, etc. His response to the ending of Legend of Korra was, as follows:

“Mr DiMartino and Mr Konietzko: You are disgusting, limp, soulless sacks of filth. You have earned the contempt and hatred of all decent human beings forever, and we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship. Contempt, because you struck from behind, cravenly; and hatred, because you serve a cloud of morally-retarded mental smog called Political Correctness, which is another word for hating everything good and bright and decent and sane in life.”

“In Which John C. Wright Completely Loses his Shit over Legend of Korra”, Jim C. Hines (Source)

I do wonder how much more extreme he’s gotten over the last few decades; Chronicles of Chaos is smug and pretentious, and sometimes mean-spirited, but it doesn’t quite have this level of bile, and it’s often quite open about the fluidity of sex and gender among characters who are, after all, incorporeal entities given human guise. Quentin’s true name and identity is that of Eidothea, the daughter of Proteus, and there are reference to Paradise Lost to explain this; a source that has a long history of complex readings in regard to gender and sexuality. I don’t have a strict rule when it comes to supporting authors I don’t agree with, it all comes down to how I feel. There are plenty of conservative writers about whom I feel no qualms about spending money on their books. But there is a real nastiness to Wright, a viciousness that would make me very uncomfortable purchasing anything else he wrote in the future.

3. It’s common in these sorts of situations to talk about “separating the art from the author”, and it’s worth asking: Do Wright’s deranged personal politics influence his novels? And the answer is: I don’t know, kind of? The Chronicles of Chaos do not feel particularly didactic or ideological to me, to the extent that there is a moral, it is a generally vague one about the importance of freedom. What it does have, to an immense degree is, well–you know the meme. There is so much bondage in these books. There are spanking scenes. The narrator gets captured and tied up so much it’s a running joke, and it’s stated at one point that she was brainwashed as a child into liking it. The series is just brimming with a weirdly-intense sexual energy that comes through in every encounter. Even interactions that are supposed to be harmless flirting come off as extremely aggressive, like when the boys tie the girls into french maid outfits and make them serve breakfast, and it is just treated as a constant, inescapable, and unquestionable fact that every male member of the faculty is obsessed with the female students. (There are some questions about old the children are supposed to be, given that they are shape-changers from beyond the borders of the universe. Sometimes it is stated to be fourteen, sometimes sixteen, sometimes in their twenties. It’s still weird). I don’t think fiction should never engage with uncomfortable topics, but it is very noticeable that when one of the male characters is sexually humiliated, it is treated as child molestation and a serious crime, whereas the constant harassment of Amelia and Vanity is treated as a joke. It is wild to me that Wright was having a meltdown about Korra and Asami holding hands, given that he wrote a version of Harry Potter where the only thing the faculty talk about is screwing Hermione. This is all in addition to the basic male-author-writing-women trope where the female narrator thinks about her breasts constantly.

4. This is often uncomfortable to read, but there is also a pretty explicit subtext content, which is that we are told repeatedly, in basically every romantic or erotic scene, that what men want to do is dominate, and what women want is to submit. This becomes explicit in the love triangle that eventually emerges between Amelia, Colin, and Victor, where Amelia is told constantly that her relationship with Victor will fail, specifically because she can overcome his powers. “But a man you can control is not really a man, is he? He’s a boychild, not a paterfamilias.” (Titans, pg. 185). This is not a particularly cutting-edge insight, but again, it is everywhere in these books. Amelia realizing that she was no longer strong enough to beat the boys is portrayed as a hugely formative event for her development. The whole thing is this bizarre combination of intense, aggressive sexuality and wholesome banality–everyone wants to get monogamously married and have children. And, to be fair, the series ends with Amelia and Victor getting together anyways (though there’s a trailing hint of future developments), so I wouldn’t even say it comes off as “ideological”, or like it’s trying to deliver a manifesto against feminism, it’s just profoundly uncomfortable to read. I think John C. Wright might have been working through some stuff.

WILL YOU LIKE IT:

Man, I don’t know. This is a hard one for me to recommend. I think it might be worth picking up if you enjoy really dense genre fiction, the kind of story that totally submerges you in a totally new world, with new ideas firing off every second. The best thing about these books is that every few pages has some incredibly cool concept being explained, some mathematical fusion of mythology and science that I’ve never seen before, and it’s got a pretty exciting plot on top of that, about becoming an adult and breaking out of school, and fighting Greek Gods on Mars in order to defend and/or destroy the universe, once you make up your mind. It’s also got a lot of Wright’s weird, weird preoccupations and fantasies, and he’s nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is. Sometimes it’s not a deconstruction of sexual archetypes, it’s just soft-core pornography, and sometimes your editor should have put his foot down. I don’t know. I’m glad I read these books, and I’m glad I own them, and I doubt I would want to read anything of his in the future. You’ll have to decide for yourself.

I don’t watch a lot of movies, especially not in theaters, and I wasn’t planning on seeing this one. I ended up seeing it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, several months after its theatrical run had ended in most places, because a friend I was hanging out with just before Christmas suggested it and I didn’t have anything else I wanted to do. Turns out it was really good! One Battle After Another is a fantastic film; incredibly intense, hilarious, and deeply topical, to such a degree that I was a little bit shocked that I haven’t heard more Discourse about it. As I said, I’m not much of a cinephile, so I can’t talk about this from the perspective of cinematic artistry, or how it fits into the oeuvre of Paul Thomas Anderson (I am relatively sure this is the first film by him I’ve ever seen, though I often get him confused with Wes Anderson). But I thought it was very interesting as a work of political and historical fiction, and I have some thoughts about that.

1. I went into One Battle knowing almost nothing about it, except that it was about a washed-up former leftist revolutionary who gets dragged back into action. My assumption was that this was going to be about some 1970s wannabees like the Weather Underground or Symbionese Liberation Army, and my understanding is that that is true in regards to Vineland, the Thomas Pynchon novel that the movie loosely based on. What I had not realized is that this movie is a full-blown alternate history, set in the present-day, and focusing on an ongoing guerilla war against a United States government that is clearly based on contemporary political trends, but distinct from them. I’d say it’s set in an America that’s about 20-30% worse in every way. Because of this, it’s hard to say exactly when the movie is set; the bulk of it seems to be set roughly “now”, given the smartphones and internet usage and so on, the prologue is set sixteen years prior, in what could be the 1990s or early 2000s. The revolutionary group the movie focuses on, the “French 75s” also appear to be a lot more effective than any of the 1970s movements they’re based on.

1. The alternate history elements are really subtle, to the point where it’s hard to be sure what’s intentional or not. The US is controlled by a white supremacist cabal, carrying out a militarized immigration crackdown, but the villain, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, at one point receives the “Nathan Bedford Forrest Medal of Honor” from the government, and in another scene, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character implies that Benjamin Franklin had been president, and then calls him “the Grand Wizard himself…..fucking slave owner.” I am still not sure if this is supposed to be subtle worldbuilding, or just an indication that Leonardo DiCaprio is extremely high in this scene. It works because it threads the needle on how “realistic” this movie is supposed to be. It’s indisputably about modern America, but it’s not quite modern America, and that lets you watch without worrying about the details. It feels fitting, in that this is a movie set in in what could easily be a dystopian version of the US, and instead it feels extremely contemporary.
2. I am actually really surprised by how little controversy I have heard about this movie, which is probably the most unabashed, blatant piece of “Trump-era” art I have ever seen. In the same way that Vineland was about the politics of the 1960s-1980s and the rise of Reaganism, One Battle is explicitly about the United States of 2025, and the racial paranoia of the government, brought to bear upon communities with the full power of the post-9/11 internal security state. This is a movie that focuses on a massive, militarized immigration raid on a small city meeting intense community resistance, and I am writing this as the residents of Minneapolis continue to organize against the ICE/CBP occupation of the city, days after the brutal murder of Renee Nicole Good by a Federal agent. Production began in January 2024, and even though Anderson had apparently been talking about making this since the early 2000s, it’s very difficult to imagine this particular version existing anytime except right now. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about how topical Andor S2 was this year (true!), and I don’t know why One Battle After Another hasn’t come up more in these conversations. Perhaps it hits a little too close to home.
3. This is a really weird movie, tonally speaking. “Black Comedy” seems to be how it has been marketed, which is true as far as it goes. It’s a very dark, very intense movie, that is also absolutely hilarious. The revolutionaries could be parodies or satires of themselves, with their over-the-top ultimatums, obsessive debates over doctrine, petty feuds, and narcissism, but they’re in a world and a conflict that feel very real, and as anyone who has been involved in any kind of left-wing organizing can tell you, the depictions here honestly were pretty much on-target. You have scenes like the one where Leonardo DiCaprio is stuck on hold trying to contact the underground, and they’re using “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as the muzak, but everything with the military and police responses is filmed totally seriously, and on a truly epic scale. The revolutionaries may be jokes, but what they’re doing is not, and we see repeatedly that there are real stakes, with real live son the line, and that these people are (sometimes) truly willing to give everything for the cause they believe in. The ultimate villains, the Christmas Adventurers Club, are pompous and absurd, but chillingly evil–and if there’s one lesson I think we should learn from these ongoing unprecedented times, it is that idiots are often the most dangerous people of all. Racism is, after all, just kind of stupid. The movie is absurd, because real life is absurd, and politics is even more absurd. That’s just the way things are.
4. One Battle After Another manages the very neat trick of being intensely political, and unabashedly partisan, without feeling didactic. It never has to explain to you the correct point of view, or lecture the viewer, because it simply creates a world in which the lessons are obvious and inarguable. It does not feel like a work of propaganda, because the revolutionary protagonists are so ridiculous and self-sabotaging and annoying, but it never lets you sight of the fact that the people they are fighting really are fascists. It reminds me of Orwell’s famous comment, that “many people who are not repelled by Socialism are repelled by Socialists. Socialism, as now presented, is unattractive largely because it appears, at any rate from the outside, to be the plaything of cranks, doctrinaires, parlour Bolsheviks, and so forth.” But the lesson of this for him is not the rejection of the movement, or even a general purge of the cranks, but rather to recommit yourself to what really matters, to remember that “Socialism does mean justice and liberty when the nonsense is stripped off it” and that “To recoil from Socialism because so many individual Socialists are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the ticket-collector’s face.”
5. There is a similar complexity with the characters, who all have a very genuine depth to them, despite being so over-the-top and ridiculous. I hesitate to call any of them realistic, given how heightened everything is, but they’re all complicated and raw human beings in ways that feel very compelling, despite the context. Lockjaw, the main villain, is such an awful, evil person, but he’s also so profoundly broken in so many ways that it’s hard to hate him. He’s this ridiculous man, driven to extremes by his own inescapable obsessions and impulses. He loves Perfidia Beverly Hills with the kind of passion that is inextricable from hatred, and he hates himself just as much. DiCaprio, playing “Ghetto” Pat, known now as Bob Ferguson, has this heartbreaking vulnerability to him that leavens the comedy of his paranoid, stoner persona. We see him in the past as an extraordinarily competent soldier for the French 75s, and how broken he was by Perfidia’s betrayal, and how committed he is to trying to keep his daughter safe from his past. Perfidia only appears in the movie’s prologue, but her actions shape everything that follows, and it’s remarkably hard to pin her down as a character; she’s just so angry at everyone, she’s utterly devoted to the revolution, but she betrays it when she’s captured, she loves Pat but she resents him–like everyone else in this movie, she’s kind of a mess, but the text of the film never feels like it’s judging her.
6. Side note, but it’s wild that Perfidia Beverly Hills is named that. It’s literally just a contraction of “Perfidious“. Like having a character named Tre A. Son, and then having them betray the team. I kind of love it. Subtly is for cowards.
7. A running theme throughout the movie–and another way in which it felt extremely relevant to today–is that nobody ever actually knows what’s going on. For all the secret plots and plans and conspiracies, everyone is constantly bewildered and confused and misled. Lockjaw is hunting down and trying to kill Willa because he needs to cover up his history of miscegenation, but when he screams at her about how she’ll never understand the importance of being a Christmas Adventurer, he just sounds like a crazy person, even though we know he’s talking about something very real and scary. When the assassin sent by the Club is killed by Willa, he has no idea who she is, and she doesn’t know or care who he is. His last moments are of utter bafflement. Lockjaw himself dies completely bewildered and betrayed, manipulated and thrown away from the men he worshiped. Bob Ferguson spends most of the movie having a genuine nervous breakdown, trying to force his weed and alcohol-addled mind to remember the secrets of his sordid past. Benicio del Toro, playing Sensei, steals every scene he’s in, and is far and away the most effective resistance leader, because he doesn’t try and delude himself into thinking he can control anything. He doesn’t panic, he just reacts.
8. The movie draws an obvious comparison between itself and The Battle of Algiers (1966), one of the most legendary pieces of revolutionary cinematography. We actually see Bob Ferguson watching it on TV at a pivotal moment. But Algiers was filmed after the war was over, when Algeria had become independent. One Battle After Another was filmed just as our country chose a captain to lead us back into Egypt. This isn’t a movie about overthrowing the Empire, and it’s not a movie about the futility of doing so either. It’s a movie about why revolution is important, even when it fails, and about how the fight never really ends. Revolution isn’t an event, it’s just a state of being. The French 75s fought, and lost–but now it’s Willa’s turn. The fact that you probably won’t win doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility to try. It is hard for me think of any theme more important and timely than that right now.