- Kroese, Robert.
The Dawn of the Iron Dragon.
Seattle: CreateSpace, 2018.
ISBN 978-1-7220-2331-7.
-
This is the second volume in the Iron Dragon trilogy
which began with The Dream of the Iron
Dragon (August 2018). At the end of the
first book, the crew of the Andrea Luhman stranded
on Earth in the middle ages faced a seemingly impossible
challenge. They, and their Viking allies, could save humanity
from extinction in a war in the distant future only by building
a space program capable of launching a craft
into Earth orbit starting with an infrastructure based upon
wooden ships and edged weapons. Further, given what these
accidental time travellers, the first in history, had learned
about the nature of travel to the past in their adventures to
date, all of this must be done in the deepest secrecy and without
altering the history to be written in the future. Recorded history,
they discovered, cannot be changed, and hence any attempt to do
something which would leave evidence of a medieval space program
or intervention of advanced technology in the affairs of the time,
would be doomed to failure. These constraints placed almost impossible
demands upon what was already a formidable challenge.
From their ship's computer, the exiled spacemen had a close
approximation to all of human knowledge,
so they were rich in bits. But when it came
to it: materials, infrastructure, tools, sources of
energy and motive power, and everything else, they
had almost nothing. Even the simplest rocket capable of
achieving Earth orbit has tens to hundreds of thousands of
parts, most requiring precision manufacture, stringent
control of material quality, and rigorous testing. Consider
a humble machine screw. In the 9th century A.D.
there weren't any hardware stores. If you needed a screw, or
ten thousand of them, to hold your rocket components together,
you needed first to locate and mine the iron ore, then smelt
the iron from the ore, refine it with high temperature and
forced air (both of which require their own technologies,
including machine screws) to achieve the desired carbon content,
adding alloying metals such as nickel, chromium, cobalt, tungsten,
and manganese, all of which have to be mined and refined
first. Then the steel must be formed into the desired shape
(requiring additional technologies), heat-treated, and then
finally the threads must be cut into the blank, requiring machine
tools made to sufficient precision that the screws will be
interchangeable, with something to power the tools (all of which, of
course, contain screws). And that's just a screw. Thinking
about a turbopump, regeneratively cooled combustion chamber,
hydraulically-actuated gimbal mechanism, gyroscopes and
accelerometers, or any of the myriad other components of even
the simplest launcher are apt to induce despair.
But the spacemen were survivors, and they knew that
the entire future of the human species, driven in the future
they had come from to near-extinction by the relentless
Cho-ta'an, depended upon their getting off the Earth and
delivering the planet-busting weapon which might turn the
tide for their descendants centuries hence. While they
needed just about everything, what they needed most was
minds: human brainpower and the skills flowing from
it to find and process the materials to build the machines
to build the machines to build the machines which, after a
decades-long process of recapitulating centuries of human
technological progress, would enable them to accomplish their
ambitious yet utterly essential mission.
People in the 9th century were just as intelligent as those
today, but in most of the world literacy was rare and even
more scarce was the acquired intellectual skill of thinking
logically, breaking down a problem into its constituent parts,
and the mental flexibility to learn and apply mind tools, such
as algebra, trigonometry, calculus, Newton's and Kepler's laws,
and a host of others which had yet to be discovered. These
rare people were to be found in the emerging cities, where
learning and the embryos of what would become the great
universities of the later Middle Ages were developing. And
so missions were dispatched to Constantinople, the greatest
of these cities, and other centres of learning and innovation,
to recruit not the famous figures recorded in history (whose
disappearance into a secret project was inconsistent with
that history, and hence impossible), but their promising young
followers. These cities were cosmopolitan crossroads, dangerous
but also sufficiently diverse that a Viking longboat showing up
with people who barely spoke any known language would not
attract undue attention. But the rulers of these cities
appreciated the value of their learned people, and trying to
attract them was perilous and could lead to hazards and
misadventures.
On top of all of these challenges, a Cho-ta'an ship had
followed the Andrea Luhman through the hyperspace
gate and whatever had caused them to be thrown back in time,
and a small contingent of the aliens had made it to Earth,
bent on stopping the spacemen's getting off the planet at any
cost. The situation was highly asymmetrical: while the spacemen
had to accomplish a near-impossible task, the Cho-ta'an need
only prevent them by any means possible. And being Cho-ta'an,
if those means included loosing a doomsday plague to depopulate
Europe, well, so be it. And the presence of the Cho-ta'an,
wherever they might be hiding, redoubled the need for secrecy
in every aspect of the Iron Dragon project.
Another contingent of the recruiting project finds itself in the
much smaller West Francia city of Paris, just as Viking forces
are massing for what history would record as the
Siege
of Paris in A.D. 885–886.
In this epic raid, a force of tens of thousands (today estimated
around 20,000, around half that claimed in the account by the
monk Abbo Cernuus, who has been called “in a class of his
own as an exaggerator”) of Vikings in hundreds (300,
probably, 700 according to Abbo) of ships laid siege to a city defended
by just two hundred Parisian men-at-arms. In this account, the
spacemen, with foreknowledge of how it was going to come out,
provide invaluable advice to Count Odo of Paris and Gozlin, the
“fighting Bishop” of Paris, in defending their
city as it was simultaneously ravaged by a plague (wonder
where that came from?), and in persuading King Charles (“the
Fat”) to come to the relief of the city. The epic battle
for Paris, which ended not in triumph but rather a shameful
deal, was a turning point in the history of France. The efforts
of the spacemen, while critical and perhaps decisive, remained
consistent with written history, at least that written by Abbo,
who they encouraged in his proclivity for exaggeration.
Meanwhile, back at the secret base in Iceland, chosen to stay out
of the tangles of European politics and out of the way of
their nemesis
Harald Fairhair,
the first King of Norway, local rivalries intrude upon the
desired isolation. It appears another, perhaps disastrous, siege
may be in the offing, putting the entire project at risk. And
with all of this, one of those knock-you-off-your-feet calamities
the author is so fond of throwing at his characters befalls them,
forcing yet another redefinition of their project and a breathtaking
increase in its ambition and complexity, just as they have to
contemplate making new and perilous alliances simply to survive.
The second volume of a trilogy is often the most challenging
to write. In the first, everything is new, and the reader
gets to meet the characters, the setting, and the challenges
to be faced in the story. In the conclusion, everything is pulled
together into a satisfying resolution. But in that one in the
middle, it's mostly developing characters, plots, introducing
new (often subordinate) characters, and generally moving
things along—one risks readers' regarding it as
“filler”. In this book, the author artfully
avoids that risk by making a little-known but epic
battle the centrepiece of the story, along with intrigue,
a thorny ethical dilemma, and multiple plot threads playing
out from Iceland to North Africa to the Dardanelles. You
absolutely should read the first volume, The Dream of the Iron
Dragon, before starting this one—although there is
a one page summary of that book at the start, it isn't remotely
adequate to bring you up to speed and avoid your repeatedly
exclaiming “Who?”, “What?”, and
“How?” as you enjoy this story.
When you finish this volume, the biggest question in your mind
will probably be “How in the world is he going to wrap all
of this up in just one more book?” The only way to find
out is to pick up The Voyage of the
Iron Dragon, which I will be reviewing here in due
course. This saga (what else can you call an epic with
Vikings and spaceships?) will be ranked among the very
best of alternative history science fiction, and continues to
demonstrate why independent science fiction is creating a new
Golden Age for readers and rendering the legacy publishers of
tedious “diversity” propaganda impotent and
obsolete.
The Kindle edition is free for Kindle
Unlimited subscribers.
May 2019 