- Schlichter, Kurt.
Collapse.
El Segundo, CA: Kurt Schlichter, 2019.
ISBN 978-1-7341993-0-7.
-
In his 2016 novel People's Republic
(November 2018), the author describes North America in
the early 2030s, a decade after the present Cold Civil War
turned hot and the United States split into the People's
Republic of North America (PRNA) on the coasts and the
upper Midwest, with the rest continuing to call itself the
United States, its capital now in Dallas, purging
itself of the “progressive” corruption which
was now unleashed without limits in the PRNA. In that book
we met Kelly Turnbull, retired from the military and veteran
of the border conflicts at the time of the Split, who made
his living performing perilous missions in the PRNA to rescue
those trapped inside its borders.
In this, the fourth Kelly Turnbull novel (I have not yet
read the second, Indian Country,
nor the third, Wildfire),
the situation in the PRNA has, as inevitably happens in socialist
paradises, continued to deteriorate, and by 2035 its sullen population
is growing increasingly restive and willing to go to extremes
to escape to Mexico, which has built a big, beautiful wall to
keep the starving hordes from El
Norte overrunning their country. Cartels smuggle refugees
from the PRNA into Mexico where they are exploited in factories
where they work for peanuts but where, unlike in the PRNA, you
could at least buy peanuts.
With its back increasingly to the wall, the PRNA ruling class
has come to believe their only hope is what they view as an
alliance with China, and the Chinese see as colonisation,
subjugation, and a foothold on the American continent. The PRNA
and the People's Republic of China have much in common in
overall economic organisation, although the latter is patriotic,
proud, competent, and militarily strong, while the PRNA is
paralysed by progressive self-hate, grievance group conflict,
and compelled obeisance to counterfactual fantasies.
China already has assimilated Hawaii from the PRNA as a formal
colony, and runs military bases on the West Coast as effectively
sovereign territory. As the story opens, the military balance
is about to shift toward great peril to the remaining United
States, as the PRNA prepares to turn over a nuclear-powered
aircraft carrier they inherited in the Split to China, which
will allow it to project power in the Pacific all the way to the
West Coast of North America. At the same time, a Chinese force
appears to be massing to garrison the PRNA West Coast capital of
San Francisco, allowing the PRNA to hang on and escalating any
action by the United States against the PRNA into a direct
conflict with China.
Kelly Turnbull, having earned enough from his previous missions
to retire, is looking forward to a peaceful life when he is
“invited” by the U.S. Army back onto active duty for
one last high-stakes mission within the PRNA. The aircraft
carrier, the former Theodore Roosevelt, now
re-christened Mao is about to become operational,
and Turnbull is to infiltrate a renegade computer criminal,
Quentin Welliver, now locked up in a Supermax prison, to work
his software magic to destroy the carrier's power plant.
Welliver is anything but cooperative, but then Turnbull can be
very persuasive, and the unlikely team undertake the perilous
entry to the PRNA and on-site hacking of the carrier.
As is usually the case when Kelly Turnbull is involved, things
go sideways and highly kinetic, much to the dismay of Welliver,
who is a fearsome warrior behind a keyboard, but less so when
the .45 hollow points start to fly. Just when everything seems
wrapped up, Turnbull and Welliver are “recruited” by
the commando team they thought had been sent to extract them for
an even more desperate but essential mission: preventing the
Chinese fleet from landing in San Francisco.
If you like your thrillers with lots of action and relatively
little reflection about what it all means, this is the book for
you. Turnbull considers all of the People's Republic slavers
and their willing minions as enemies and a waste of biochemicals
better used to fertilise crops, and has no hesitation wasting
them. The description of the PRNA is often very funny, although
when speaking about California, it is already difficult to parody
even the current state of affairs. Some references in the book
will probably become quickly dated, such as Maxine Waters Pavilion
of Social Justice (formerly
SoFi Stadium)
and the Junipero Serra statue on Interstate 280, whose Christian
colonialist head was removed and replaced by an effigy of pre-Split
hero Jerry Nadler. There are some delightful whacks at
well-deserving figures such as “Vichy Bill” Kristol,
founder of the True Conservative Party, which upholds the
tradition of defeat with dignity in the PRNA, winning up to 0.4%
of the vote and already planning to rally the stalwart
aboard its “Ahoy: Cruising to Victory in 2036!”
junket.
The story ends with a suitable bang, leaving the question of
“what next?” While People's Republic
was a remarkably plausible depiction of the situation after the
red-blue divide split the country and “progressive”
madness went to its logical conclusion, this is more cartoon-like,
but great fun nonetheless.
March 2020 