Conquistador
Jun. 1st, 2009 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowAnother of my recent reads is S. M. Stirling's Conquistador. I'm not going to give a full-blown review; I just have a few comments, some of them spoilery, so they'll go under a cut.
The basic setting is yet another Stirlingesque A.U. In this case, a just-returned veteran named John Smith VI, in 1946, discovers a gate to another world - one in which contact had not yet been made between the Old and New Worlds. He enlists a crew to begin exploiting that world, maintaining a beachhead on this one to allow them to use modern technology in that exploitation. In the course of the story, a couple of outsiders stumble upon his secret, are shanghaied into "New Virginia", and help put down a coup attempt against Smith.
Overall, it's pretty much standard fare from Stirling; it's less intricate and, frankly, less well-developed than the worlds in the Nantucket and Corvallis trilogies, but it has the usual merits of a Stirling novel: a well-thought-out alternative history, resourceful characters, and so forth. He devotes a great deal of space to descriptions of landscape, of a California as yet untouched (or only lightly touched) by industrial civilization. I suspect that's a major part of the point of the story, the beauty of California-that-was. Unfortunately, from my point of view, the rest of the story has some very unpleasant undertones.
To begin with, Smith deliberately (and, from his POV, for good reason) built New Virginia by recruiting desperate men; at different times, this has meant fugitive Nazis, former Communists, and die-hard supporters of apartheid. The political strains within his would-be utopia that arise from this are predictable. Worse, the general neo-feudal structure Smith set up has an unpleasant resemblance to the Mafia. (Indeed, one of his early lieutenants is an Italian-American with more than a hint of Mafioso about him. Stereotype much?)
The people of New Virginia - those, at least, who are permitted to cross back to our timeline and thus have a basis of comparison - regard early 21st-century California, and modern industrial civilization in general, as somewhat hellish; and yet their dominance in their timeline is parasitic on the achievements of ours. I suppose most colonies are thus parasitic, but this is one which prides itself on its separation from its point of origin; this bit of hypocrisy prejudices me heavily against them.
There's more. Smith, and some of his immediate followers and successors-to-be, are at least in principle determined not to let their California go down the same path. And yet the birth rate in New Virginia is quite high - one character describes it by saying that "the Baby Boom never really ended here". To avoid heavy environmental degradation, that will have to change sooner or later. But a society such as is depicted should already have undergone the demographic transition - and if the rate of increase is so high even then, what is going to slow it down when the time comes? Smith will be gone by then, and at least several more generations will have passed; who will have both the power and the will to change things? Smith's utopia, I suspect, is headed for a very bad smashup somewhere down the line.
There are a couple of minor points worthy of note. The band of conspirators against Smith includes a number of Afrikaners; I suppose Stirling found it amusing to give some of them the same names that Harry Turtledove chose for the AWB bastards in The Guns of the South. Also, Stirling has a couple of characters, bantering about "kemosabe" and "Tonto", claim that the former means "son of a bitch" and the latter "fool". To the best of my knowledge, no one is quite certain what "kemosabe" was supposed to mean, but the major contenders do not include "SOB". (Vine Deloria Jr., in one of his books - Custer Died for Your Sins, maybe? - inserts a puckish footnote to the effect that "kemosabe", in a certain obscure Southwestern language, means "honky", but he was obviously joking.) As for "Tonto", it's true that "tonto" means "fool" in Spanish, but as far as I know, Tonto was named after the Tonto band of the Apaches, and it is doubtful whether their name has anything to do with the Spanish word. I may be mistaken on both counts - Stirling is no slouch on linguistic issues - but his claims are not consistent with my understanding.
Anyway, if you've read much Stirling, you know more or less what to expect; this is a minor work, cut from the same cloth as his better stories.
The basic setting is yet another Stirlingesque A.U. In this case, a just-returned veteran named John Smith VI, in 1946, discovers a gate to another world - one in which contact had not yet been made between the Old and New Worlds. He enlists a crew to begin exploiting that world, maintaining a beachhead on this one to allow them to use modern technology in that exploitation. In the course of the story, a couple of outsiders stumble upon his secret, are shanghaied into "New Virginia", and help put down a coup attempt against Smith.
Overall, it's pretty much standard fare from Stirling; it's less intricate and, frankly, less well-developed than the worlds in the Nantucket and Corvallis trilogies, but it has the usual merits of a Stirling novel: a well-thought-out alternative history, resourceful characters, and so forth. He devotes a great deal of space to descriptions of landscape, of a California as yet untouched (or only lightly touched) by industrial civilization. I suspect that's a major part of the point of the story, the beauty of California-that-was. Unfortunately, from my point of view, the rest of the story has some very unpleasant undertones.
To begin with, Smith deliberately (and, from his POV, for good reason) built New Virginia by recruiting desperate men; at different times, this has meant fugitive Nazis, former Communists, and die-hard supporters of apartheid. The political strains within his would-be utopia that arise from this are predictable. Worse, the general neo-feudal structure Smith set up has an unpleasant resemblance to the Mafia. (Indeed, one of his early lieutenants is an Italian-American with more than a hint of Mafioso about him. Stereotype much?)
The people of New Virginia - those, at least, who are permitted to cross back to our timeline and thus have a basis of comparison - regard early 21st-century California, and modern industrial civilization in general, as somewhat hellish; and yet their dominance in their timeline is parasitic on the achievements of ours. I suppose most colonies are thus parasitic, but this is one which prides itself on its separation from its point of origin; this bit of hypocrisy prejudices me heavily against them.
There's more. Smith, and some of his immediate followers and successors-to-be, are at least in principle determined not to let their California go down the same path. And yet the birth rate in New Virginia is quite high - one character describes it by saying that "the Baby Boom never really ended here". To avoid heavy environmental degradation, that will have to change sooner or later. But a society such as is depicted should already have undergone the demographic transition - and if the rate of increase is so high even then, what is going to slow it down when the time comes? Smith will be gone by then, and at least several more generations will have passed; who will have both the power and the will to change things? Smith's utopia, I suspect, is headed for a very bad smashup somewhere down the line.
There are a couple of minor points worthy of note. The band of conspirators against Smith includes a number of Afrikaners; I suppose Stirling found it amusing to give some of them the same names that Harry Turtledove chose for the AWB bastards in The Guns of the South. Also, Stirling has a couple of characters, bantering about "kemosabe" and "Tonto", claim that the former means "son of a bitch" and the latter "fool". To the best of my knowledge, no one is quite certain what "kemosabe" was supposed to mean, but the major contenders do not include "SOB". (Vine Deloria Jr., in one of his books - Custer Died for Your Sins, maybe? - inserts a puckish footnote to the effect that "kemosabe", in a certain obscure Southwestern language, means "honky", but he was obviously joking.) As for "Tonto", it's true that "tonto" means "fool" in Spanish, but as far as I know, Tonto was named after the Tonto band of the Apaches, and it is doubtful whether their name has anything to do with the Spanish word. I may be mistaken on both counts - Stirling is no slouch on linguistic issues - but his claims are not consistent with my understanding.
Anyway, if you've read much Stirling, you know more or less what to expect; this is a minor work, cut from the same cloth as his better stories.
