James Nicoll Reviews

2006’s Empire is the first volume in Orson Scott Card’s Empire series.

America! The greatest nation to have ever existed, with the greatest president ever. Not that you’d know that if you listened to unpatriotic liberals or ungrateful latte-sipping French intellectuals, all of whom would have been speaking German or maybe Russian if it weren’t for America.

Having served bravely in The War on Terror, TWOT-warrior Reuben Malek is reassigned to stateside duty in the Pentagon. There Malek will face new challenges, not least of which is workplace friction.

Oh, and also the Second American Civil War. That’s important, too.

Malek’s co-worker Captain ​“Cole” Coleman is frustrated by a lack of information about the nature of the duties to which he and Malek are assigned. He’s have too much difficulty arranging for a briefing from Malek. Cole goes so far as to track down Cecily, Malek’s wife and mother of their five children. Unconventional, but it does win Cole the briefing he needs.

Malek and Cole’s meeting has hardly begun when suddenly and without warning, terrorists attack! The White House is partially leveled and the president is killed, along with many members of his administration. Senior-most survivor, Speaker of the House Lamonte Nielson, becomes president.

Malek immediately realizes that only one man on Earth was cunning enough to think of firing a rocket at the White House. That man? Stalwart TWOT-warrior Reuben Malek, whose job it is to think of ingenious ways terrorists could attack the USA, so that defenses could be arranged. Someone with the clearance to access to Malik’s work appears to have appropriated Malek’s scheme and put it into action.

Malek has scarcely begun trying to clear his name when the next phase of the attack on goodness, decency, and adorable puppies is launched. All across America telefactored robots controlled by the so-called Progressive Restoration launch cowardly attacks in a bid to force on America a despicable far-left-wing agenda.

The Progressive Restoration leader is Aldo Verus. Or so it seems. In fact, Verus is just a doomed catspaw for the true architect of the Second American Civil, a man who is far closer to the Oval Office than anyone suspects.

~oOo~

Empire was a tie-in novel for a computer game. Not the first tie-in novel Card wrote. Card’s version of James Cameron’s Abyss was well received. Empire is equally memorable, although for somewhat different reasons.

Card never outright says the president who is murdered is George W. Bush, but it’s pretty clear that it is. It’s also pretty clear that Verus is George Soros. Card is explicit about his historical model: it’s late Republican/early imperial Rome. Of course it is. Rome is the only great nation of whose rise and fall American SF authors are likely to be cognizant.

Interesting historical detail: birth control was legal in the US in 2006. It’s not that Malik and his liberal-but-basically-agrees-with-Malik-about-everything wife are unable to avoid having five kids, as might be the case in 2025. They want the kids they have. More importantly, they take care of those kids. It’s a reasonable bet with SF of this era that any family with five kids is a prelude to a homily about the Population Bomb¹, but in Card’s case, you’d lose that bet.

At the time Empire was written, Card was enthusiastically blogging away about various topics important to him², so his mind-set at this time wasn’t in any way a secret. Card was (and for all I know, is) not keen on non-conformity and dissent. It’s not that people (which is to say, Americans) should not have the right to be different³ and to think differently. It’s just that they should have decency not to use these rights in public.

Public criticism of the US, in particular from people with academic or journalistic credentials, particularly vexed Card. He felt rejecting what one might call the Leader Principle was irresponsible behavior from a group he sneeringly referred to as ​“Smartland.” The lack of uncritical foreign adulation of the US also got under his skin. This leads to one of Empire’s most memorable scenes:

“You look pissed off,” said Malich.

“Yeah,” said Cole. ​“The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy.” 

Personally, and I might be a wild-eyed extremist here, if someone flattened the Centre Block⁴, killing Justin Trudeau in the process, the possibility that someone on the other side of the Atlantic might be laughing would not be what most annoyed me about the situation. Also, if you’re going to dismiss what Europeans think, it’s best to do that succinctly, rather than devoting a half a dozen paragraphs to discussing what Europeans think. A page of discussion leaves the impression that you care passionately what Europeans think.

Having recently read Robinson’s Night of Power, I see parallels previously overlooked (beyond the fact that both sets of rebels start with New York City). In particular, the two authors have set for themselves tasks for which they are not well suited. Card desperately wants to appear even-handed; to convince people his target is only the extremists on either side, not the very slightly right or very slightly left moderates. However, any time his brain-bees start buzzing, it’s very clear that Card’s critique of one side is far more pointed than his tepid critiques of the other.

This is where my editor usually prods me to talk about prose and characters. Well, the prose is hewn from economy-grade softwood and the characters from America’s finest cardboard. That said, it’s by no means the worst right-wing novel about a second American Civil War that I have read, because that would be Kratman’s State of Disobedience.

Clearly readers were more impressed by Empire than I was, because the book got a 2009 sequel, Hidden Empire. No sign of a third book but who knows? Perhaps Card will be inspired by Trump’s ascendency.

Empire is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo). A number of those links lead to an omnibus edition. 

I did not find Empire at Words Worth Books.

1: See, for example, Ben Bova’s 2007 Titan, whose plot is driven by women’s universal inability to resist spewing out infants like natal gatling guns even on life-support-deficient space stations.

2: Card’s World Watch (which was called War Watch for a while) has since been scrubbed from the interwebs… almost. It can be read via the Way Back Machine.

3: Unless they are gay, in which case jail time is necessary.

4: Again. The highly flammable Centre Block was burned to the ground during the Great War by a conflagration set off by a lit cigar discarded, as was the custom of the time, into a paper-filled wastebasket in a room filled with combustibles. Nobody could have predicted the disaster.

The death toll was exacerbated when people ran deeper into the burning Centre Block to retrieve valuables. I’ve helped clear buildings when the alarms have gone off and people still do that.