Paul Di Filippo Review of GENERAL STRIKE on Locus
Norman Spinrad’s last novel from one of the Big Five houses was The People’s Police in 2017. I know he was a bit frustrated with its packaging and launch and subsequent support campaign, so it’s no great surprise that his newest fiction is self-published. I would hope that a writer with such an awesome career would find his fans following him loyally into this brave new world.
Spinrad’s latest is a near-future, realpolitik excursion of the kind he does so well, and which has garnered him much acclaim. It has a playful yet fierce moral and tactical urgency to it, and the scenario it presents—cultural, geopolitical, and intimate—has great verisimilitude and believability. What it does not have is a huge amount of plot. For the majority of the wordage we take an illuminating tour of the world while riding the protagonist’s shoulders. Then, towards the end, he has a brainstorm, does a certain rebellious thing, and deals with the luckily positive fallout of his actions. That’s it. I have no problem with such a slice-of-life scenario, but those looking for an action-packed thriller will have to look elsewhere.
Our hero is slightly anomalous in SF, I think: a hardcore middle-aged military man, General Albert Pearson. Not a rebel, still basically a believer in the system, he’s just received a promotion for taking over a certain toxic global hotspot: the Eastern Central Asia Theater, or ECAT.
“Paghastan,”… was the area that had once more or less been “Pakistan” and “Afghanistan”… the “Big P” the Big Peninsula, the territory including what had been Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Viet Nam, and other odds and ends… Secondarily, were “Islandia” and “Sealand.” “Islandia” was mainly Indonesia, a vast archipelago of hundreds of islands large and small where the most chaotic action was on both banks of the numerous ship channels infested with pirate gangs and mini-states on both sides. Sealand was everything else left over, the main battlefields being the Philippine islands and the jungles of Papua New Guinea.
The area has been a chaotic warfront for decades, and is deemed a perpetual wasteland. American troops die daily, but the world’s rulers are happy just to see the status quo maintained. But this does not sit well with our conscience-stricken hero. So after acquainting himself with the facts on the ground and with his subordinates, he conceives of a trick—with the help of his rambunctious trade union brother—to change things up. And his trick succeeds.
As I said, not a plot-heavy or suspenseful tale. Nonetheless, I was captivated by Spinrad’s portrayal of both the future venue and the people therein. It’s wry, fast-moving, sardonic agitprop, obviously modeled on the current eighteen-year-old war in Afghanistan. If you can point me to any other SF author extrapolating so boldly from current headlines and wearing his heart on his sleeve, I’d be obliged. Otherwise, Spinrad rules.
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