Oh noeeeeeeeeez the terrorists nuked LA! Now the US has embarked on a war of despair in the Middle East, in a 21st century version of the Crusades. There are concentration camps for Muslims and Arabs in Europe, and internment camps for them in the US. The US has opened its borders to moderate Muslim civilians fleeing European hatred. The internment camps might suck, but at least there’re more ways out of those then DEATH.
There are several things this work does right.
1. There’s a sustained critique of fanaticism. There are several types of good guys and they’re caught between two militant, conservative types of organized religions. The new kind of American Christian is terrifying, and the idea that this organized religious group would garner enough political power to become an official branch of the US Armed Forces? That doesn’t seem wholly unlikely.
2. There are several types of soldier. The ethnic diversity of the Armed Forces is at least acknowledged. Unfortunately, they’re all men.
3. The action’s way more compelling than other technothrillers or other pieces of military SF that I’ve read this year. While that’s not saying much, I found myself really invested in the evolution of strategy, and the idea that after the use of nuclear munitions, you wouldn’t be able to rely on electronics or whatever in terms of planning your strategy. It’s very smart.
Uhhh. Three = several, right? Because I think I’m out of stuff I liked. I actually want to go back to the paucity of female characters in this work because it actually really bothered me. We don’t get to see a female POV until 12 chapters in. This is the general’s wife, who’s trying to hold down the homefront.
The female characters mentioned and Sarah, the wife, mainly work to highlight what good men our guys are. Sgt. Garcia thinks about his mother’s death like ALL the time, and it’s part and parcel of him missing the wasteland of East LA. It also highlights his compassion for the Muslim women/girls he encounters, since he compares them to the snooty, arrogant Chicanas he knew in high school. They get contaminated with the same taint of nostalgia and frustration that colors all his memories of growing up Chicano and poor in the US, and their trickiness (one’s a suicide bomber) highlights how NOT-HOME this new battle is. Nasr jokes about how he’s not fully a member of the Special Forces, because he hasn’t yet gotten into and out of a marriage yet, and then reminisces about the sexy, lusty, unpredictable woman he’d never let himself get close to. All this while he’s dying and thinking of his parents. Cavanaugh is haunted by the violence experienced by civilians transported in trains to the German border. In each case, women are victims, reminders of lost innocence, and signifiers of home. Muslim women are silent — they’re either hollow eyed rape survivors begging for American rescue, or are suicide bombers whose rage is as unpredictable as a pretty little teenager’s disdain. :weirded out by the conflation of sexual desirability, Otherness, and danger:
It would take an amazingly powerful POV to interrupt this. Sarah, the general’s wife? Not that. She’s hiding from her husband that their daughter just died, and while that could be a powerful moment in the story, it’s not. Instead of emphasizing her strength, Peters emphasizes her struggle, suggesting that Sarah, too, is swept up by the same overwhelming forces of history that her husband is drowning. Unfortunately, Sarah’s not a swimmer — she’s not even an agent in this story. When The War After Armageddon ends, Sarah’s story is closed out, and not by Sarah herself. Someone else talks about how she insisted that her husband was innocent of the war crimes he’s been accused of, and how she was eventually put into a mental hospital, where she died. Her surviving daughter became a ‘fallen woman’ — in this new America I couldn’t tell if that meant she became sexually promiscuous, a sex worker, or a feminist, all of which would’ve been interesting to explore in more than one sentence.
IN CONCLUSION: Men (even poor men of color) can be historical actors. Women (even rich white women) cannot. Men (even poor men of color) can strive and fail and it’s noble. Women (even rich white women) fail at warfare, survival, and being civilians, and it’s tragic.
What especially sucks about this is that it’d be possible and interesting to have Sarah be a military spouse, and just have her be dynamic as such. Someone paralleling Carren Zeigenfuss would’ve been great — someone with experience in the Army, who serves her community in a variety of ways, whose politics are part of what she does versus what she is.