Just Finished Reading: Conquistador by S M Stirling.

It’s 1946 and ex-Marine John Rolfe is putting his life back together after returning from the Pacific War. Whilst fiddling with his Ham radio a blast of energy knocks him across the room. On awaking he discovers the event has caused a gateway in the fabric of space-time which allows him to enter a new world – one where European settlers never ‘discovered’ North America. So begins an adventure for John and a select group of war buddies.

Sixty years later anomalies that cannot be ignored lead the FBI and agents from the Fish and Game Authority to uncover the Gate but before they can report in they are shanghaied. Once in the Commonwealth of New Virginia they soon find themselves opposing a plot to overthrow the existing regime and replace it with a far more repressive one.

This certainly started out with an interesting idea though hardly an original one - People stumble upon a way to escape their world and start a new life far away from the corrupting influence of their own civilisation. The Gateway is purely a plot device to get from here to there. It is never explained and in fact hardly mentioned. The object of the novel appeared to be the grandstanding of Mr Stirling’s idea of a Utopia (or at least that’s how it came across to me). The so-called Alternate History is very sketchy, revolving around the fact that Alexander the Great died years later than he did in this timeline thereby upsetting European history to the extent that in 1946 they still had a medieval level of technology. Also, rather conveniently, the various diseases brought by John and his chums virtually wipe out the Native Americans – so no complex interactions are required with them.

The Commonwealth of New Virginia is described throughout most of the novel in tedious detail (quite a few pages I had to skim over to preserve my sanity). It was basically a Redneck heaven, a Republican wet dream. The East Coast of North America (as well as Hawaii) is governed by 30 Families and their retainers. They have huge tracts of land and enormous personal fortunes. The prevailing attitudes seemed to be stuck in the 1950’s with a distinct deference to Authority at its patronising best. Women are back ‘in their place’ (usually as breeding machines) and are happy with their lot. The workers seem satisfied with low taxes and cheap beer. The ‘servant class’ are Mexicans flown in for short term contracts and chemically sterilised for the duration. The papers, cinema and local Intranet are all censored and dripping with propaganda that no one seems to notice. Everyone is healthy and happy – apart from the few criminals who serve their time on the ‘chain-gang’ before being rehabilitated back into polite society (or shot).

I found the whole culture deeply disturbing and more than a little objectionable. Of course such a society would probably work at least for a while. The society was very resource rich both in land and minerals. The population was low and incredibly homogeneous – having a total of 25 Black Americans out of a population in excess of 150,000. They had access to all the best 21st Century technology money can buy without any of the responsibilities and so on. An oligarchy such as this might be a good place to live for a generation or two – but would only be as good as the leaders who shape it. Once bad leaders appear the Utopian edifice would quickly collapse – as it almost did in the novel.

Overall Conquistador was predictable. Not particularly well written it had two dimensional characters within a plot so thin it was easy to discern the real intent of the book – to sell a critical ideology and to portray and alternative utopian society rather than an Alternate world. Not recommended.