- Ferrigno, Robert.
Prayers for the Assassin.
New York: Scribner, 2006.
ISBN 0-7432-7289-7.
-
The year is 2040. The former United States have fissioned into the
coast-to-coast Islamic Republic in the north and the Bible Belt from
Texas eastward to the Atlantic, with the anything-goes Nevada Free
State acting as a broker between them, pressure relief valve, and
window to the outside world. The collapse of the old decadent order
was triggered by the nuclear destruction of New York and Washington,
and the radioactive poisoning of Mecca by a dirty bomb in 2015,
confessed to by an agent of the Mossad, who revealed a plot to set the
Islamic world and the West against one another. In the aftermath, a
wave of Islamic conversion swept the West, led by the glitterati and
opinion leaders, with hold-outs fleeing to the Bible Belt, which
co-exists with the Islamic Republic in a state of low intensity
warfare. China has become the world's sole superpower, with
Russia, reaping the benefit of refugees from overrun Israel,
the high-technology centre.
This novel is set in the Islamic Republic, largely in the capital of
Seattle (no surprise—even pre-transition, that's where the
airheads seem to accrete, and whence bad ideas and flawed technologies
seep out to despoil the heartland). The society sketched is
believably rich and ambiguous: Muslims are divided into
“modern”, “moderate”, and
“fundamentalist” communities which more or less co-exist,
like the secular, religious, and orthodox communities in present-day
Israel. Many Catholics have remained in the Islamic Republic, reduced
to dhimmitude and limited in their career aspirations, but largely
left alone as long as they keep to themselves. The Southwest, with
its largely Catholic hispanic population, is a zone of relative
personal liberty within the Islamic Republic, much like Kish Island in
Iran. Power in the Islamic Republic, as in Iran, is under constant
contention among national security, religious police, the military,
fanatic “fedayeen”, and civil authority, whose scheming
against one another leaves cracks in which the clever can find a
modicum of freedom.
But the historical events upon which the Islamic Republic is
founded may not be what they seem, and the protagonists, the
adopted but estranged son and daughter of the shadowy head of
state security, must untangle decades of intrigue and misdirection
to find the truth and make it public. There are some thoughtful
and authentic touches in the world sketched in this novel: San
Francisco has become a hotbed of extremist fundamentalism,
which might seem odd until you reflect that moonbat
collectivism and environmentalism share much of the same desire
to make the individual submit to externally imposed virtue which
suffuses radical Islam. Properly packaged and marketed, Islam
can be highly attractive to disillusioned leftists, as the
conversion of Carlos “the Jackal”
from fanatic Marxist to “revolutionary Islam”
demonstrates.
There are a few goofs. Authors who include nuclear weapons in their
stories really ought seek the advice of somebody who knows about them,
or at least research them in the Nuclear Weapons
FAQ. The “fissionable fuel rods from a new Tajik
reactor…made from a rare isotope, supposedly much more powerful
than plutonium” on p. 212, purportedly used to fabricate a
five megaton bomb, is the purest nonsense in about every way
imaginable. First of all, there are no isotopes, rare or otherwise,
which are better than highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium for
fission weapons. Second, there's no way you could possibly make a
five megaton fission bomb, regardless of the isotope you used—to
get such a yield you'd need so much fission fuel that it would be much
more than a critical mass and predetonate, which would ruin your whole
day. The highest yield fission bomb ever built was Ted Taylor's
Mk 18F Super Oralloy Bomb (SOB), which contained about four
critical masses of U-235, and depended upon the very low neutron
background of HEU to permit implosion assembly before predetonation.
The SOB had a yield of about 500 kt; with all the short half-life junk
in fuel rods, there's no way you could possibly approach that yield,
not to speak of something ten times as great. If you need high yield,
tritium boosting or a full-fledged two stage Teller-Ulam fusion design
is the only way to go. The author also shares the common
misconception in thrillers that radiation is something like an
infectuous disease which permanently contaminates everything it
touches. Unfortunately, this fallacy plays a significant part in the
story.
Still, this is a well-crafted page-turner which, like the best
alternative history, is not only entertaining but will make you think.
The blogosphere has been chattering about this book (that's
where I came across it), and they're justified in recommending
it. The Web site
for the book, complete with Flash animation and an annoying
sound track, includes background information and the author's own
blog with links to various reviews.
March 2006 