Terrible Revolutions: Worlds (2023)
Adrian Tchaikovsky (1972)
445 pages
Apocalyptic novels and movies have been all the rage in recent years, portraying various catastrophic ends for civilization, whether asteroid impacts, zombie infections, or alien invasions. Climate change, the COVID pandemic, and wars that threaten to turn nuclear have apparently left many people fearing the worst – and fully prepared to indulge in fantasies reflecting that.
Perhaps, however, rather than anticipating existential risks from some unlikely source, humankind should more fear a future in which civilization survives, but in the form of an enduring dystopia run by an elite few.
It is precisely such dark visions of civilization gone awry that the brilliantly creative storyteller Adrian Tchaikovsky explores in Terrible Worlds: Revolutions. In each of the three novellas of this mind-bending collection, he extrapolates present-day concerns and challenges into disturbing, if all too plausible, futures – just at the point when people finally rise up against what has been imposed upon them.
As I began the lead story, Ironclads, I felt a kind of déjà vu, though not to another work of fiction. Rather, the future civilization Tchaikovsky depicts seems to follow all too inevitably from the description of our present-day reality laid out in a recent book of history and political science. In The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (my review linked to at right), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway demonstrate how business groups, over the course of the 20th century, engaged in a successful propaganda effort to convince the American public to become free market fundamentalists. At the heart of this campaign lies a rejection of any regulation, any tax, any government involvement in the economy at all, as these groups
transmogrify a self-serving argument for business privilege into a seemingly virtuous defense of cherished American values … embedding it in the bedrock of American culture, to the point where the myth would be mistaken for age-old truth. (119, The Big Myth)
In Ironclads, Tchaikovsky carries this present-day myth forward into a future in which free market fundamentalism has become the American religion – a denomination referred to as “Church of Christ Libertarian.” Corporations dominate power in the country, effectively controlling the government (even more than they do today), with corporate leaders and their families being, as one character sardonically describes it
the Deserving. These groups were rich because it was God’s plan, just like if any of us got rich, that would be God’s plan too. Just like any of us might get rich somehow. We could be president too. Everyone said so. We just had to work hard and wait our turn. (17)
In order to grow their market in this future world, these American corporations have moved beyond their present-day propaganda and lobbying efforts, banding together to instigate a violent crusade against countries that don’t accept the truth of free market fundamentalism. Along with the masses of expendable grunts fighting these wars, the scions of corporate leaders also join the fight, but from inside indestructible mechanical bodies, ironclads: playing at war, without risking their lives. As the story opens, three soldiers are sent on a mission to find out what has happened to one such ironclad, who has disappeared in Sweden while fighting. What they discover about the global corporations’ tenuous allegiance to nationalism or national governments, will shock even these soldiers’ cynical outlook.
And so it goes in Firewalkers, which is set several generations in our future, with climate change making life increasingly difficult across the world, but especially in a steadily expanding band of desertification spreading from the equator. The wealthy elite have begun the construction of space stations, with robots on-board to serve their needs, planning to leave behind the world to those who have become (to borrow Harari’s word) irrelevant.
In a small town which has sprung up near a complex from which a space elevator rises up to one such space station, the townspeople scratch out a living by supporting the needs of the wealthy who arrive to stay at the complex’s hotel for a few days, waiting to be taken up to the space station to live. Among the townspeople are the firewalkers, young adults who earn their livelihood by going out into the inhospitable, surrounding desert to fix issues with the solar arrays critical to maintaining the amenities that make the rich comfortable as they wait at the complex. As the story opens, one such group ventures out on a mission, and comes to discover that they are not the only ones angry about being left behind.
In the final story, Ogres, a different response by the wealthy elite to environmental degradation and social upheaval has played out. Over the course of several generations, bioengineered genetic changes have been deployed to create a master class, a small but significant group of people with increased size, strength and aggressiveness relative to the rest of a now diminished – in number, and physical and mental stature – population. Referred to as ogres, these elite have imposed a feudal society, in which they are a kind of modern nobility, with the rest of the population a downtrodden working class. When an unusual man born in a farming village defies, and eventually comes to threaten, the social order, however, it becomes clear that, to borrow the phrase, life finds a way.
In Terrible Worlds: Revolutions, Tchaikovsky extrapolates our present reality into disturbing potential dystopias. But, the outcomes of his stories here leave some hope: although the elite may exploit their advantage to the point of creating such hellish futures, their mastery will never be absolute; however robust the systems of control they impose, revolution still, eventually, comes for them.
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