In order to explain a) why I own a copy of this book and b) why I'm bothering you with it, we need a little background first...
[INT. HOTEL, LATE AFTERNOON: The convention floor lobby of the Denver Sheraton West circa late October, 2003. It's convention season in west Denver again, this time the venerable MileHiCon has invaded the hotel. The lobby is not quite packed, but it is quite busy. Our hero, THE FOURTH MAN, a short, hairy chap dressed in denim and a battered (but still snazzy) cowboy hat exits from an adjoining conference room where he has just spent the last hour or so hearing about the joys of programmable matter. Having a half-hour to kill until the annual DASFA Turkey Read-Off, THE FOURTH MAN decides to pull up a seat at one of the convienent tables and catch up on reading his spoils from the dealer's room.]
It's about at this point where a guy carrying a big box o'books sits down at an adjoining table and starts selling books to curious people. I'm not really paying much attention at this point, but sooner or later he catches my eye. While I'm pondering exactly who this guy is and why the hell he looks so familiar, he notices my interest, leans over in my direction and says, I swear to God:
"Hey, do you like to laugh at terrorism?"
I can't resist a line like that. In this Brave New Post-9/11 World Where Everything's Changed Except Not Really, it seems like terrorism is the one thing nobody's allowed to joke about. So I'm pretty much sold right there. As I'm talking with the guy about the concept for the book, it suddenly occurs to me that this silly looking bloke with the big box o'books is actually Dr. Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, Entering Space, founder of the Mars Society and all-around major gadfly on the space advocacy circuit.
A couple more minutes and fifteen bucks later, I'm the proud owner of an autographed (To "wibble" - I wasn't using any of my better known pseudonyms or even my real name that day.) copy of Dr. Zubrin's newest book, The Holy Land.
The ad copy on the back cover reads:
"To save the Minervans from oppression in the central galaxy, the liberal Western Galactic Empire relocates the sect to their ancient homeland of Kennewick, Washington. But for the fundamentalist fanatics who rule the United States, the presence of pagans in the holy city is intolerable. "When direct assault to expel the intruders fails, the U.S. government tries to mobilize galactic opinion by moving the Kennewicians into miserable refugee camps and recuriting their children for suicidal attacks on the Minervans. But this play for sympathy falls on deaf ears of the policy makers of the mighty WGE. "If the Minervans are ever to be removed, the WGE needs to recieve a more forceful message, and the President and his cabinet are prepared to deliver it. Camps for training planet assassins are set up. Soon, billions of pagan aliens would know the wrath of the followers of Jesus. "Unfortunately, there was one little problem with this brilliant plan..."
It's pretty bloody obvious who the major players are supposed to be here, and if you haven't figured out who's representing what by about Page 20, then you're probably the densest human being on the face of God's Earth. If the satire was any more heavy-handed, the book would probably plunge through the Earth's crust and eventually settle in the core. Subtle, this ain't.
That said, Dr. Zubrin is actually pretty fair with his satire. Very few of the major Power-types who make appearances in the book (the American religious fanatics, the pragmatic-to-a-serious-fault Weegees, the galactic media teams who're more interested in blood n'guts than truth, etc.) get off lightly. The only execption to the rule are the Israeli-analogue Minervans, the majority of the ones we meet being rational, reasonable and just plain nice to a fault. When the rest of the big stereotypes are all portrayed as bastards to one degree or another, it's a bit jarring to find a group which gets off lightly.
The book's second half, which takes us a bit off the broad satire and into a slightly more nuanced look at life under the thumb of the lunatics and megalomaniacs we meet in the first half, works well to stress the idea that "people are just people everywhere." There's a number of characters involved in The Holy Land who perform acts of decency under pretty hideous circumstances; in another book this would lead to horrible melodrama, but Dr. Zubrin plays it just straight enough to allows the reader to empathize but not get sucked out of the overall absurdity of the storyline. It's a tightrope act, and it occasionally doesn't quite work; an extended bit where the Minervan heroine deals with American culture at large sometimes dives too deep into the Church of the One True Rational Secular Humanist to be anything but Dr. Zubrin preaching to the congregation.
In times like these, when we're all constantly wondering whether or not what we see on CNN is ripped from the Onion headlines, it's nice to see somebody point out the inherent absurdity of the times we live in. Dr. Zubrin is a competent enough writer, and he can figure out what's nutty about the damn planet without slipping into conspiracy theory or bullshit theology.
The Fourth Man recommends The Holy Land as a good companion piece for your Onion compendia. The book is available from Polaris Books.
Posted by the Fourth Man at February 17, 2004 06:12 PM