"A State of Disobedience"
OK, so it's a polemic—with the expected flaws and advantages of the genre. I understand that Tom Kratman's book, A State of Disobedience, is his first novel. It's sometimes rough around the edges, as novels early in a writer's career can be, and it definitely has a didactic agenda, but still... pretty well-written, enough so that I'll get his next book, Watch on the Rhine (written with John Ringo), either by pre-ordering through Baen Books or Amazon.com, or via Baen's Webscription service. (eBooks have their place. :-) A State of Disobedience is a cautionary tale concerning just what could happen if the Fantasists (and their cynical masters in politics, the media and academia) actually did decide they had enough power to compel everyone to toe their Fantasist line. It's not a pretty book, and the denouement is decidely noir, but still, what kind of optimist would it take to look at current knuckling under of a majority Congress to minority whining and, well, lying to expect our polity to become more civilized over the next few years? A brief taste from the intro to the book will give you enough to rough out and idea of the basic conflicts involved. Briefly, things seemed to be on the road to improvement. National political and philosophical differences seemed cast aside one terrible morning in 2001 amidst the shrieks of thousands of bombed, battered, burning victims of a vicious terrorist attack that threw all awry. As polemic fiction, it does suffer from the excesses of the genre: demonizing the antagonist(s), hagiography of the protagonist(s), etc. But with that as a reminder, and the fact that it's a very quick and entertaining—though at times shocking—read, I'd say it was well worth the purchase price and time spent reading it. |