I read a recently released future history novel about a naval conflict between the United States and China. “2034” was written by Eliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavrides. The novel was entertaining even though it had very elementary skills at fiction writing and so provides a good sense of how elemental are the properties of fiction, that fiction is an enterprise that is pleasing in its basic idea, and so to be examined to find out just what that is. I think of it as “painting by the boxes” which was a pastime of some decades ago when people would use the paints provided by dabbing each of the thousand square boxes with the number designated in each square. The painter, not really an artist, found some satisfaction from completing the project. It was less demanding than doing a crossword puzzle. And what resulted was a picture that had the elements of painting, however rudimentary and mechanical was the process. The painting had color, texture, composition and emotional tone, which is what emerges from any painting even if there is little art that makes it deeply feeling or thinking. The same is true of this novel which alludes to the elements of the novelistic style rather than freshly or vividly engaging it as that of a distinctive accomplishment, but satisfying nonetheless. Moreover, it also has a moral theme and a sense of war that at least reminds the reader of more significant fictional and real events and are worth noting because even people, including writers, also have takes on the military life and the history of nations that are worth observing because they render cliches rather than insights.
Here are some of the standard devices of fiction which are used in “2034” that make any fiction satisfying. There is a woman who commands a three ship task force who is elevated to Admiral. That comparison, the jarring sense of someone from lower echelon to a much higher one, always provides an irony of how someone will now fit the higher rank and still remain recognizable as the lower one. That is true of “Henry V” and also of “Abe Lincoln of Illinois”. She had, in her youth, a serious romance with a young man who is now part of the National Security Council, just as Becky Sharp finds a way to find an eligible bachelor military officer whose helpmate she becomes before he goes off to Waterloo. There are minor figures in “2034” who have to die so that death is a possibility and is poignant, as is Yorick in “Hamlet” and a lower level functionary in “Startrek”There are allusions to the esprit de corps of the military, as in Cozzens’ “Guard of Honor”, and to tragic decisions as in “Twelve O'clock High”, though nothing in “2034” seems inevitable or fated, just mistakes. Bad events happen from a remote view, as is the case in “Vanity Fair”. There is anxiety and tension about events about to transpire as well as the repercussions and consequences of events just transpired, which is everywhere in fiction and plays. That makes stories satisfying.
Fiction also offers grand explanations that tie the characters and events together into what it all means. Doesoevski does this grandly and convincingly in the disquisition of the grand Inquisitor in “The Brothers Karamazov”. Norman Mailer has a general wax on about why Japanese troops can endure battle better than can the overfed American ones and so offers a kind of argument for Fascism. And, of course, Tolstoy says the great Man of history, such as napoleon, is defeated by the circumstances of history, which include that in Russia distances are long and winter is cold, which is just a platitude and not up to dealing with the contrast between the man versus his circumstances since Hitler did conquer europe and nearly russia before the wealth of the United States came to the rescue. Natasha and B are more interesting than tolstoy’s view of history.
Ackerman and Stavridis offer a similar platitude which can roll around in your mouth and seem profound but is poppycock. He says that nations are destroyed from within, his main example being that the National Security Advisor is a popinjay, even though there is no scene that takes place where the higher ups discuss what they are doing to manage the escalating crisis between the Americans and the Chinese. It seems to me just a flabby right wing talking point so as to distrust civilians and take military men as the ones who safeguard America. And a moment shows that it isn’t true. The Soviet Union did deteriorate from within in the course of its seventy or so years, but the Nazi regime was destroyed by enemies from without. Great Britain withstood rebellions and foreign attack, but sustained itself for a thousand years and is very comfortable power though too few people and wealth to remain anything but a middle power. There is no reason to think that the United States can remain the first or second power in the world for another hundred years in that its area (including Canada) and its population (including the EU) vie with that of China and has withstood civil war and even, recently, an insurrection, and remains prosperous and vigorous. Like most novelists, their political thoughts are fiddle faddle.
The main failure of the imagination in “2034” is its plot. It imagines a war just ten or so years ahead of where we are now as a situation in which two nuclear powers would escalate, doing tit for tat, until the two are forced to stop by a deus ex machina. But what we should have learned in the major wars of the twentieth century is that each war is different, follows a different principle and practice. The first World War was a stalemate for most of its far years because the advantage was on the defensive. The machine gun meant that attackers were slaughtered at least until the later stages of the war when artillery used to soften up defensive positions were sufficiently robust and well coordinated with infantry advances. The tank was the queen of the Second World War because it could allow lightning strikes and punctures into the defensive armada. The Vietnam War saw asymmetrical warfare in that American patrols were ambushed by ill equipped opponents and there was little room for a jungle to allow tanks while airpower did not curtail the movement of men and supplies through the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Conventional war in the Persian Gulf War to regain Kuwait should not dissuade military thinkers that something new wouldn’t occur in a new major war. The major effort might not at all involve nuclear confrontation. There might be cyberwarfare that would enervate the economy. John Updike imagined such a war, our buildings whole but our nations weakened as economic powers and so on the cliff of deteriorating beyond a fully operational society, and so social mores falling part as a result. Such a war would not be a surprise, the the author did not contemplate it, even though thinking deeply about munitions is what the expert is up to, only discovering stealth technology and hacking into an enemy’s electronics.
Here is another way in which elementary forms of literature that give satisfaction are elaborated into art by the artist’s ability to reimagine their stories. They look at the externals or the givens of history or character so as to deepen them. In art, for example, seascapes do not invent the curves of shorelines or the flatness of water. What they do is change hues and give points of view to accentuate or give a fresh view of geometries that just exist in life. Similarly, novels notice or refer to conflicts or the structures of buildings and ships as the furniture of the social and material world even if only perfunctory novels rely on the reader to fill out his or her imagination of what that is like rather than create or reimagine so much how that found object or situation or personality becomes, as the expression goes, becomes the author's own, so that there is a new Jersey but it is reimagined into being Philip Roth’s New Jersey, and sometimes, with a really great author, the real of sheep and lanes and villages and manor houses are replaced by Jane Austen’s imagination of that same place.
The same thing happens in “2034”. It alludes to rather than spells out a nuclear confrontation between China and the United States. It does not spell out the devastation of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”, just mentioning the glow on the horizon and the number of casualties. It stays outside the confines where important decisions were discussed and decided, even as “Dr. Strangelove” does, and Robert Kennedy does in his “Thirteen Days”. A first hand account of the deliberations about the Cuban Missile Crisis. I don’t think the author thought himself artful enough to undertake those portraits, and so only alluded to them. But the truth is that the historical context of a two generation long period of impending doom was enough to give me the hebejebes. It arose the sense of fear, desperation and hopelessness in the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse that might in thirty minutes describe all of civilization and, so some believe, all human life This novel was sufficient that people would control themselves rather than end with a paroxysm of mutual annihilation, but it did remember those feelings before heads cooled down and the soviet Union and the United States created nuclear arms treaties, a prospect that for a while seems unreachable. Saner heads prevailed. This novel, however, recycles the Cold War dread and recalling that fear is the novel’s paydirt, and I am not at all worth reexperiencing that horrible foreboding and past anticipation unless something new and fresh is offered, which is not the case. So pass it up.