Geopolitical Nightmares

One way to characterize eras is by their nightmares, as delivered, of course, by it's culture's fantasists. And so there is, within the Science Fiction umbrella a subgenre of Geopolitical Nightmare Stories. In the Cold War era, we had such things as Robert Heinlein's "If this Goes On", George Orwell's "1984", and any number of various and sundry apocalypses. Post-cold-war, we've been stumbling between various different Nightmares, from the generic Corporate-dominated (and simultaneously Asian-Ascendant) worlds of Cyberpunk (and, for that matter, Kurt Vonnegut's "Hocus Pocus"), to environmental collapse stories like John Barnes' "Mother of Storms" (or the anti-environmental collapse story of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn's "Fallen Angels" for that matter) to the New World Disorder of John Barnes' "Kaleidescope Century".

Of course, five years ago Geopolitics gave us some new nightmares.

And that's why two of the books scheduled for this coming year have such an interest: two surface-similar Geopolitical Nightmare Stories, from authors about as far apart politically as it is possible to publishably get: Orson Scott Card's "Empire" and Ken MacLeod's "The Execution Channel". Will be interesting to see where they meet and diverge and meet again...