By Tom Anderson.
Picture courtesy Amazon.
This entry in the Paleofuture article series, in which I look at classic works of science fiction from the 20th Century and then consider how their future predictions line up against the reality of time that has passed, will be somewhat different to the others.
Emprise was published in 1985, somewhat later than most of the books I have looked at thus far, and is also far less well known. As we’ll see, however, I consider this to be a pity, as it’s quite an impressive book in many ways. I should probably begin, therefore, with explaining how I came across it in the first place.
Michael P Kube-McDowell is the slightly unnecessary nom de plume of science fiction author Michael Paul McDowell, born 1954. (His author bios also helpfully clarify that ‘Kube’ is pronounced ‘Kue-BEE’). The choice of a pseudonym may be because McDowell has written in a bewilderingly wide variety of genres, and some authors do feel a need to segregate their SF work (see also Iain Banks vs Iain M Banks).
I am one of probably many people who became aware of McDowell because he was one of a number of authors employed by Bantam in the 1990s to write the first wave of Star Wars Expanded Universe novels. In 1998, I went on a cruise to the Norwegian fjords and, for the first and only time in my life, underestimated the amount of reading matter I needed to take with me. (A problem which the Amazon Kindle has thankfully made obsolete). What I did bring was McDowell’s aforementioned Star Wars contribution, the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy, which I therefore ended up reading twice on the same holiday.
A solution to the problem of holiday reading.
Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
The Black Fleet Crisis is an interesting example of how the Star Wars Expanded Universe was handled at the time. As a reader in the 1990s, one notices the inconsistencies and tonal shifts from one author to the next, with each given a time slot after Return of the Jedi to work on. Today, however, I recognise just how ambitious it was to produce so many books in parallel with limited communications between authors and editors, and it really is all the more remarkable that there were as few inconsistencies as there were. Even given this description, however, it is worth noting that McDowell’s Black Fleet Criss books stick out as being tonally distinct from the others. This is for a number of reasons.
McDowell believed that the Star Wars setting should actually be able to change and evolve; rather than everyone using X-Wings and Imperial Star Destroyers forever ’cause that’s what the viewer’s seen on the screen, they should become obsolete and replaced. Twelve years after Return of the Jedi, McDowell envisages a New Republic that has become the legitimate ruling body of the Galaxy, with a proper naval fleet and a Senate and everything. Indeed, some Senators now worry that there is governmental overreach and the Republic has built a fleet that could be used for offensive operations. Said fleet is made up of new ship designs such as Nebula-class cruisers, Republic-class star destroyers, K-wing bombers and E-wing fighters. Admiral Ackbar from the original films is retired. There’s a secret intelligence service called Alpha Blue, headed up by Admiral Drayson. Princess Leia is a harried President of the Republic subjected to media pressure ripped from 1990s headlines of the Clinton Administration. The Empire is completely gone except for the tiniest slivers of tinpot warlords, and there’s a new threat from the Yevetha – a race clearly inspired by Imperial Japan in WW2 (or Western perceptions of Imperial Japan, turned up). The Yevetha managed to take over their old Imperial occupation fleet and now plan a programme of expansion.
It's all very interesting stuff, albeit sometimes it feels like it’s too far removed from Star Wars – more like the square peg of an original military science fiction setting hammered into the round hole of Star Wars. McDowell has three main viewpoint character strands and accompanying plots.
The major plot follows Leia, Han, and various military figures as they become aware of the Yevetha threat and seek to oppose it. There are two smaller plot strands. The first consists of Luke Skywalker going off with a mysterious woman called Akanah to try to find his mother, from a group of Force-sensitives called the Fallanassi (this was written before the prequels and we knew who she was – but, of course, it turns out she was lying anyway). The third is led by Lando Calrissian as well as R2-D2 and C-3PO, and is the most incongruous part of the whole story: it’s a ‘Big Dumb Object’ science fiction story (clearly influenced, in hindsight now I’ve read it, by Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama) in which Calrissian and company try to make sense of a mysterious ship known as the Teljkon Vagabond.
The three parts do not connect with each other at all until the very end. The Luke subplot is easily the weakest in my opinion, and I thought this even at the time, never mind when the reader who’s watched the prequels knows it’s all a waste of time. It just feels like an excuse to remove Luke from the wider plot, allowing McDowell to (in the third book) manage to bring back and redeem Chewbacca’s family from the Star Wars Holiday Special (!) to rescue Han from the Yevetha, rather than Luke do it as one would expect.
Other Star Wars authors had issues with McDowell’s writing, in particular Timothy Zahn who found it absurd that McDowell has Luke use the Force to warp people’s perceptions of his appearance rather than, you know, wearing a disguise. And, of course, as soon as McDowell’s books are over, almost every other author decito forget about his new ship designs and go straight back to X-Wings and TIE fighters and Star Destroyers pew pew pew. I do have some sympathy with McDowell on this point, even though I don’t agree with all his decisions. The Black Fleet Crisis also suffers from a problem common to some other Star Wars books of this era, such as Roger MacBride Allan’s Corellian Trilogy, where (I assume) timescale and editorial pressure meant that a lot of time and ink is spent setting up an interesting situation, and then the climax is rushed through in an anticlimactic manner. This is a real shame.
Anyway, I always found McDowell’s writing interesting enough that I was curious about what he had written outside Star Wars. While I knew that Bantam had, unsurprisingly, drawn on established SF writers when doling out their Star Wars projects, McDowell’s other work remained vague ‘by the same author’ references at the start of the book. British bookshops often fail to stock much by American SF authors who write in original settings, with the occasional exception from indie shops like Forbidden Planet. Indeed, many of the Star Wars Expanded Universe authors fall into the same category; even the very popular Zahn struggled to get his own original works into UK bookshops. This is another area where the development of the Amazon Kindle and eBooks has transformed reading greatly for me, as often many of the books I could never get hold of as a younger reader are now available in eBook form.
Thus, I have finally managed to get hold of the first in McDowell’s own original SF trilogy The Trigon Disunity, penned a decade before his Star Wars work. 1985, as I said before, saw the release of the first volume in this trilogy, Emprise. I have just finished it (not having read the others yet) and now want to give my first impressions here. Going in, this was more a decision out of curiosity to see what McDowell’s other work was like, and I did not necessarily expect it to be a rich vein of paleofuture. However, in contrast to my expectations, Emprise has probably yielded more paleofuture fodder than any other book I have covered in these articles thus far.
When imagining what else McDowell had written, my first thought was that he had probably developed a military SF setting like the one he had tried to marry Star Wars too. However, I had forgotten that the Lando Calrissian portion of The Black Fleet Crisis is more based on classic “Big Dumb Object” type SF, and Emprise is closer to the latter. However, what I found particularly interesting is that it is also an example of… I don’t know if there is an established term for this subgenre, but I call it “Geopolitical SF”. Basically, the kind of near-future SF that doesn’t try to ignore or brush over the national divisions of Earth, but tries to realistically imply they will continue to be significant. This is challenging, as it requires an author to have some level of knowledge about global politics and other cultures, and then it is easy to fall into stereotypes. It is this kind of subgenre which I have written in myself when writing SF (I will cheekily plug The Surly Bonds of Earth , Well Met By Starlight , and the upcoming third book On the Wings of the Morn). In hindsight I am quite glad I never read Emprise at an earlier age, as otherwise I would have probably been too influenced by McDowell’s own ideas.
Before I begin, I should say that I cannot really discuss the book without significant spoilers, though I will avoid mentioning the biggest plot twists towards the end of the book. For anyone seeking out the book, I should also note a content warning that there is a graphic and harrowing scene of sexual assault about two-thirds of the way through, which involves a character’s backstory and is completely out of place with the rest of the writing. Now read on!
The book begins with a brief future-epilogue hint about what may happen in the future, then indulges in an infodump about what happened in the 20th Century – which is interesting enough to keep the reader’s attention. Interestingly, Emprise is not straightforward SF but, again like my The Surly Bonds of Earth, is alternate history – I think, as McDowell is not entirely clear and it could be taken to be secret history. “Emprise” even means “grip”, which has multiple meanings in the book but could be taken to mean ‘trapped on Earth’ like my own book’s title… this is getting weird.
McDowell posits that, starting in the 1950s, a secret international group of scientists became concerned about nuclear war and began searching for ways to prevent it. They eventually produced the ‘fission blanket’, a field which manipulates the weak nuclear force to render nuclear reactions impossible across an area. It turns out to be permanent, and soon proliferates out of control, with the result that nuclear weapons are now useless. McDowell is intelligent enough to realise that, in fact, this would be A Bad Thing, as now there is no restraint on conventional warfare anymore.
Furthermore, the world reaches Peak Oil and a new revolutionary Islamic state in Saudi Arabia tries to cut off the oil supply. Both the United States (under President Novak) and Soviet Union invade the Middle East in the ‘Fuel War’, but ultimately just end up exhausting each other in the process and shattering into multiple successor states. The fuel supply dries up.
With nuclear power no longer an option, and solar and wind not ready, power consumption is cut to a bare minimum. South American countries default on loans and international banking collapses. There is a description of people heading out of the cities into the fields to scratch an agricultural living. The human population collapses to less than three billion. And everywhere, people blame scientists for the whole situation and persecute and attack them.
By the time the book opens in 2011, McDowell has sketched a genuinely original and creepy dystopia unlike almost anything I have ever read. The only thing it did remind me of (a coincidence) is Ed Feery’s The Darling Buds Express from Sealion Press, [3] in which the UK has to cope with oil cut off, but that is far more upbeat in tone.
The ever-present (but never spoken) reminder to the reader is that the scientists did all this because they feared nuclear apocalypse, yet this miserable existence in which the human race is winding down feels even worse than the aftermath of nuclear war. It is properly chilling, yet McDowell does not glory in dystopia as many writers do; rather, the book is about how this dying state of affairs comes to an end.
The actual trigger is similar to that in many other SF books, but the original setting means we can easily forget that. A long-wave radio astronomer out in the backwoods of the western former US, concealing the fact that he still has a functional dish, discovers an inexplicable signal. A sceptic of aliens himself, it takes a long time for him to convince himself it is an alien signal. (Incidentally, it’s mentioned at one point that the apparatus of the Arecibo radio telescope came crashing down and destroyed it, so, um, good prediction, Michael). The original discoverer, Chandliss, goes to a town where a radioman can still raise people in distant towns and cities. After desperately trying and failing to find any American contact, he manages to get in touch with an old British classmate, Eddington, and transmit the message. But the suspicious radioman alerts the locals, and it’s implied that Chandliss gets lynched for his scientific activities.
Eddington, based in Cambridge, calls in some colleagues who try to interpret the message, but in the end it’s solved by his young daughter, a fan of Agatha Christie mysteries. This experience makes Eddington have a breakdown, and it’s his colleagues who take the message (an appeal that an alien presence is on its way to Earth) to Whitehall.
Britain is in a bit of a better state than the United States, with a functional government, some remaining coal reserves and a trickle of North Sea oil left. However, we’re still constantly reminded of the dystopic elements, such as the fact that there’s only one train a day from Cambridge to London. We then get a soul-destroying montage of the scientists being ignored, dismissed, and mocked by various figures in Whitehall. In desperation, they talk about taking their findings directly to the King, but a ‘King’s Witness’ secret policeman overhears them. They are taken to the Old Bailey and sentenced to death in a kangaroo court.
For this sequence to work, it needs to be at least largely well informed about Britain (see my point earlier about the challenges of ‘geopolitical SF’) and, somewhat remarkably for an American writer in the 1980s, McDowell mostly pulls it off. He still makes a fair few minor mistakes, but they’re impressively few for someone in a pre-Internet era when research was much more difficult. The dystopia becomes believable to a British reader, and that is no mean feat.
Incidentally, McDowell also says in passing that the House of Lords has been abolished, and its review powers now largely transferred to the monarch; on the other hand, he also says that the scientists start by trying to see “the peer for Cambridgeshire”, so not sure what that means. It is exactly the sort of stupid compromise reform term the UK might use, admittedly.
Fortunately, the scientists are rescued by the King himself – King William V. Yes, in 2011. It’s noted that he came to the throne at a young age because King Charles was killed, and Queen Diana left a paraplegic, after an IRA attack (after which the British Army conducted reprisal operations in Northern Ireland). Have I mentioned this book was written in 1985? Actually, it’s impressive how much you can fit the description of William here to the real one, considering he was a toddler at the time the book was written. He is the one man in Britain who does believe the scientists, but keeps it secret and has them quietly working for him behind the scenes. He calls a conference in Geneva to share the news with other leaders; initially they all seem to disbelieve him, but then it’s revealed that the Indian and Chinese representatives are convinced – but think it’s too dangerous to publicly announce.
Princess Diana (left) and Ronald Reagan (right) in 1985.
Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Together, Britain, India, and China set up the Pangaean Consortium, with other nations as associate members. Their public goal is to try to rebuild the world after the devastation of the last three decades; their true goal, to prepare the world for first contact with the approaching aliens, remains secret. Devaraja Rashuri, the Prime Minister of India, becomes head of the Consortium, and is the closest thing the book has to a protagonist.
Again, I do want to dwell on how impressive it is for an American writer to pitch a concept like this at the time, especially as I think Emprise is McDowell’s first full-length science fiction work. For someone writing in 1985 to posit a scenario in which the USSR and USA are near totally irrelevant (at least until later for the USA fragments) is remarkable. McDowell probably does make some mistakes with India and China which would stick out more to a reader from those nations, but it’s still a game effort. In fact, Russia is barely mentioned at all, except for the fact that a Chinese character was involved in taking over Vladivostok when it collapsed. (Another prediction which looks a lot more plausible now than it probably did in 1985, given Russia’s current headlong dive into geopolitical irrelevance).
Much of the first part of the book is devoted to the struggles of Rashuri and others to try to rebuild a scientific and engineering base from scratch after years of the persecution of scientists. They struggle to launch satellites again using China’s Long March rockets, but finally manage to repair an experimental solar power satellite and gain access to a reliable power supply. China also brings its allies of Indonesia, the Philippines, and others (though the ‘East Asian Cooperation Sphere’ terminology McDowell uses is probably a wee bit too WW2 Japan for a term the Chinese would use). However, as pointed out at the start, the Chinese as past victims of colonialism are far more paranoid about the intentions of the alien ‘Senders’, and Rashuri has to balance that against the more naïve views of the British and other westerners. (Though France and Germany refuse to get involved at first).
Later, a religious movement arises in America which identifies the Senders with the Second Coming, and Rashuri successfully plays them off against the Chinese. This is a good example of what I mentioned in the introduction to this article series, of how the rather naïve views of some science-fetishist writers in the mid-20th Century came crashing down with the reassertion of faith as a geopolitical force at the end of the 1970s. McDowell’s writing reflects the era in which he wrote; while the faction he describes is a tad simplistic and stereotypical in many ways, it’s also used intelligently in the story setting.
After the Consortium manages to establish itself in space, the rebuilding can truly begin, including broadcast centres across the world (we see one being established for a Brazilian tribe) where propaganda can be used to prepare the people’s mindset for the approaching aliens.
The rebuilding of civilisation is a genuinely heart-warming part of the book. Even some of the three American successor states (the United North, Calaska, and Dixie – McDowell also predicted Paradox game mods, apparently) become interested. This is where the timescale becomes a little confusing, as when the Consortium launches a satellite in the early 2010s, it’s said to be the first launch in ‘thirty years’ and the Space Shuttle debuted in 1981, but not only did the Shuttle still happen in this timeline, the Dixie President finds four ‘Shuttle II’ orbiters, based on a concept being worked on at the time McDowell wrote the book. Still, it’s not a major issue.
Incidentally, McDowell correctly predicts dynastic politics in Africa but picked exactly the wrong nation – at one point the Consortium negotiates, for raw materials, with Denis Mobuto, dictator of Zaire. Well, you can’t win ’em all.
The Consortium eventually succeeds in its goal of not only preparing the people for first contact, but in building a starship to send out and meet the Senders before they reach Earth. In order to do so, they need a new drive technology. What they come up with is similar to that used in Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth series, in which an artificial gravity well is created ahead of a ship and then the ship ‘falls forward’ into it. At the end of the book, McDowell includes a short story he published in 1980 which ties in with this. Of course, the story does not really fit the setting he’d since developed (for a start, the drive is said to be faster-than-light, when in the book it merely allows acceleration to an appreciable fraction of light). He craftily gets around this by claiming that the story was commissioned by King William as one of the propagandist tales of scientific heroism put forth by the Consortium to encourage people to come back to science!
The latter part of the book involves that starship, with a crew of four – a British scientist, an American member of the religious faction, a Chinese army officer, and Rashuri’s own son – heading out into space to meet the Senders. I won’t spoil the ending, in which everyone, perhaps even the reader, will be met with surprise after all that build-up.
Overall, Emprise is a very ambitious and impressive novel, fascinating now for paleofuture aspects just as much as for its generally heart-warming message of recovery from disaster. With the caveat I mentioned above about the very graphic scene of sexual assault which many may understandably be put off by, it is certainly a work I would recommend. But I will revisit this in another article when I have read the second in the series, Enigma.
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Tom Anderson is the author of several SLP books, including:
The Look to the West series
among others.
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