SEPARATING FOR LIGHT AND TRANSIENT CAUSES?

I'm going to combine observations on Kurt Schlichter's Inferno and Overlord, the two most recent Kelly Turnbull novels, now the seventh and eighth of a series, into a combined post.  The post therefore comprises Book Reviews N^o. 14 and N^o. 15, although we might view it as revising and extending a previous omnibus post dealing with the fourth through sixth novels.  In that post, I noted, "It's difficult to write speculative fiction in the middle of events, and I suspect that turning Kelly Turnbull loose to frustrate the wokies and kill people, whilst mocking the coastal cosmopolitans and their pronoun protocols and other manifestations of effete snobbery might sell more books than, oh, tackling the substantive political economy of separation, which was hinted at in Conservative Insurgency, and which calls for more concreteness as the Jarrett regency continues to flail."  That series of reviews concluded with the liberation of part of the West Coast in Collapse to prevent the Chinese from turning California into a colony.  Afterwards, the People's Republic fragmented further, with a west coast capital somewhere in Washington, er, Hillaryia, and another either in the Douglass Commonwealth or somewhere around New York.  The details don't matter; neither does the involvement of Russia on the side of the eastern half, nor an apparent European war and English civil war going on at the same time.  And, as with the previous books, the Colonel concludes, "Don't let this fiction become nonfiction."

In my review of Collapse, I called attention to difficulties in the more militaristic United States that could give even the most un-woke reader pause.

First, citizenship and voting rights are contingent upon military service. Never mind the high-faluting talk of common purpose and earned citizenship: compulsory service is an inefficient use of resources. Second, after the Split, a sentencing commission reviewed the life sentences of numerous terrorists, spies, and criminal masterminds in Federal custody and sent a few of those directly before a firing squad. Cathartic, perhaps, but destroying due process to save due process might better be avoided.

In both Inferno and Overlord, those pressures give rise both to attempts by the less ideological in both countries to consider some sort of reunification, and the strain tells in different ways in the quarreling republics.  Earned citizenship and compulsory service sound good on paper, but after many years of civil war and repeated reserve call-ups, keeping enough troops on the line, whether it's the Sierra Nevada or along the Susquehanna is more difficult, and people who might have little love for the woke way of life also figure citizenship and voting rights aren't worth getting shot at, as long as they can retain the fruits of their labors and engage in commerce with their neighbors.  Or, they can reject the authority of either government and light out for the territories.  There aren't enough United States troops and marshals to control the land they notionally occupy, and the People's Republic doesn't have the discipline even to control the remaining land the Chinese are helping them occupy.  Thus come the plot complications, which is to say, the opportunities for Kelly Turnbull to kill people.

Thus we get all sorts of squabbling militias, including disaffected crossers whose higher privilege levels and pronoun protocols enforced on pain of death do not compensate for their barren lives and permanent baby fat, leave-us-alone drug merchants and bikers who have little use for High Ideology of any kind, and the genuine crazies.  Mix in a resurgence of swampy behavior among those less-ideological compromise seekers (what have I told you, dear reader, about bipartisanship?) and you have the organizing structure, such as it is, for Kelly Turnbull's primary mission, which is to forestall the compromisers and the Bonapartists from corrupting what's left of the United States or from creating a new country that would not be an improvement on the constituent parts of the warring countries.  That's still not resolved, and another Kelly Turnbull novel, title not yet announced, is in preparation.

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.)