in the rocket's red and blue glare

[reverancepavane]

One of the things that has serious disappointed me over the last few years is the large amount of very jingoistic "science fiction" coming out of a certain publisher in the US (whose various authors I tended to like enough that I used to collect their monthly electronic releases by subscription). Typically extremely right wing, pro-American, anti-Arab, and so gung-ho it hurt; although claiming to have been written by authors who had seen the sharp end, they read more like the product of a REMF (if one will excuse the expression). So it was nice to read a book where the military characters who had seen combat were trained, competent, and sensible. There is a reason why Ender's Game is on the reccomended reading list of a large number of militaries, including both the US and Australia, even though Orson Scott Card has (to my knowledge) not seen military conflict. He is also one of the few US fiction authors I'm familiar with who can look dispassionately at the US (probably because of his Mormon background), so it was interesting to take a look at his take on the Red vs Blue divide that (at least to us outsiders) seems to be heavily polarizing US political thought. Empire is set in the near future and does a very good job of detailing how it would be possible to create a Second American Civil War, even given the lack of geographical seperation of the two ideologies (the myth of Red States and Blue States is a media invention, if you break voting down by county it tends to be the "blue" urban population vs the "red" rural population). In this case the war is the result of purposeful manipulation to create a civil crisis so that those involved in the manipulation can take power, and comparisons are made with the end of the Roman Republic, and the assumption of power by Augustus. One very nice point he makes is that the fanatics polarise discussion; even if the majority of the members of the group are moderate the members of the group are often forced to identify with all the issues of the group. Invidious comparisons are made with the Balkans and Rwanda, and how, when the fanatics start firing, the entire group has to respond for its own survival, and any that preach moderation are often purged for being traitors to the group. On the face of it, it is a nice military thriller, but beneath it lies an interesting examination on the manipulation of ideologies. How accurate it could be, I couldn't say.