A Cautionary Tale Applicable to Our Present World

The Year of Jublio! by Joseph T Major
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's long been theorized that John Wilkes Booth and his convicted accomplices were in fact part of a much larger conspiracy aimed at wiping out as much of the Union government as possible. This novel of alternate history is based upon the idea that, not only was this true, but it succeeded almost completely.

However, the author does not immediately present us with this scenario. Instead he begins the novel some years later, when our protagonist is a youngster growing up in a United States that superficially looks like the Gilded Age US we know from history books. Except weird little things keep popping up, such as the references to Lincoln as "Father Abraham," and being spoken of as though he were still President, yet also being referred to as having been martyred. Only slowly do we learn how Lincoln's assassination was part of a decapitation strike that wiped out the entire Line of Succession, leaving the surviving senior Union government officials in a position where they had to somehow maintain the function of the Executive Branch, but none of them had any formal standing to assume the Presidency.

Much like Aleck in the author's Alternate World War II series, the protagonist of this novel is American-born but with strong ties to the UK aristocracy, being heir to a baronetcy. As he goes to England to receive an appropriate education and subsequently becomes an officer in the British Army in the Boer War and then their equivalent of World War I, he watches the land of his birth go deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole of obsession with seccesionism and slaveocracy.

I do not believe that the author intended this novel to be allegorical of any Primary World government (although certain actions are strongly reminiscent of the former USSR, particularly under Stalin, albeit with the Cult of Personality focused on a martyred President rather than a living Leader), but it is certainly a very applicable warning against the dangers of becoming obsessed with an enemy long after the defeat of the nation it represents. And most of all, the danger of erasing or rewriting history, as the alternate America does in reducing every leader from the Revolution to the 1860 election to nameless ciphers, as if Lincoln personally masterminded and led every success the US ever enjoyed.

Review copy provided by the author.

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Zilbrant the Traitor by Catherine Mintz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I originally started reading this novel as the family was coming back home from Christmas Eve service at church, and intended to read it piecemeal over the next several days. However, when I got back to reading it the next day, I ended up spending pretty much all day on Christmas reading it, even when I'd intended to do some other projects. I just couldn't keep myself from reading "just a little bit more."

I originally met Zilbrant in Ms. Mintz's short story "Earth Ashes Dust" in the anthology Past Future Present 2011. When I read it, I initially assumed that the author was unthinkingly using the trope of the Medieval peasant village recreated In Space, since such things are not uncommon in space opera. But as I read further in the story and learned about the history of the Varr, of the initial hostility of many humans to their creation and the consequent wars with atrocities on both sides, I reinterpreted the crushing poverty of Zilbrant's family's village and the religion that seemed deliberately designed to keep them down as a case of vengeance being more valuable than economy.

When I found out that there was a novel about Zilbrant, I was immediately interested. The title intrigued me, since she didn't seem to be the sort of person who would willfully and maliciously betray anyone, but she was certainly in a situation in which conflicting loyalties could create one or more double-binds that would lead her to be condemned by one or another party (or maybe several) as a traitor. A situation sort of like "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

The beginning does not simply copy the original short story, instead weaving in first person narrative threads by two apparently artificial entities, one a spaceship in orbit over Zilbrant's homeworld, which finally has a name and a place in a larger galactic setting that Zilbrant's brutally limited education gave her no way to know. There are also two other human characters' stories, both told in third-person limited POV, one a rebel against the Varr and the other one of their trusted servitors. All these POV's can be a little difficult to follow at times, but it gives us a far broader and more nuanced view of the situation. The Varr are not entirely vicious oppressive tyrants, although their rule is certainly not democratic even on the worlds where the elite has not become corrupt. It turns out that, while the Skalmar religion was indeed artificially created, it was not as a tool of oppression, but as a way of keeping the early settlers of newly terraformed worlds from self-sabotage when the scientific rationales for restrictions on their activities couldn't be culturally transmitted. The Skalmar faith was supposed to be something that their descendants outgrew when the world's ecology became sufficiently established to allow for luxuries, for interstellar travel, not a crab bucket ideology dragging everyone back down.

Perhaps it was too much to hope for our protagonist to break free of her conditioning and move beyond the stifling poverty of her upbringing to go out into the bright and unbounded universe. But it's quite possible that she was right in believing that this transformation, however delayed, still needed a number of generations before their people could view the Skalmar revelations as mere superstition (albeit supported by the judicious, if creepy, use of tech) and roll their eyes at what their ancestors once believed.

Even so, I do want to read more stories set in this fascinating universe, even if Zilbrant has no more stories, just an ordinary life as an ordinary peasant woman.

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Short, but Has a Punch

The Chooser: A Tale of Modern Valkyrie by David L. Burkhead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't know whether this novella inspired the meme going around about the child who died fighting off his abuser showing up in Valhalla, or if the novella is a response to the meme, but it certainly digs into the idea, trying to understand what it would mean -- and what it would take for a child to grow into the reward for that moment of adrenaline-fueled courage.

I really like how the author dropped just enough details for us to figure out the ethnic background of young Kamil and his father, but never explicitly stated that they were immigrants (probably refugees) from the Middle East living in one of the Scandanavian countries. By doing this, he's able to keep the focus on the individuals and their choices, and avoids having a whole bunch of political stuff dragged into what is fundamentally a story about a person breaking free of a dysfunctional, abusive family situation and winning his freedom.

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