Wednesday 8th July 2009
by CarolineFictional Benjamin Franklin says to our hero in a dream:
It’s said that “power corrupts,” but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The same are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.
This is the money idea from David Brin’s The Postman (yes, that Postman), an allegorical near-future dystopia with a LOT of different elements in the mix. All of the civilizations on Earth have been effectively wiped out by a believable one-two punch of war, atomic bombs, disease, and culty survivalist mayhem, tailed by a three-year-long nuclear winter.
As with a lot of books in this genre, we follow the one exceptionally intelligent, reasonable man who is capable of restoring the whole order of things. In Brin’s novel the United States attempts to rebuild itself, and the Oregon towns he visits are each in various stages of western development (hunter-gatherer, feudalism, slave-based societies, communal states) that are influenced by Brin’s traveling hero, Gordon Krantz. Although this is some unspecified future year (2020ish), each village has a historical angle and a different type of characteristic leader, so when Krantz’s behaviors make the villagers self-conscious of their ignorance or return to cruelty, it reads more like speculative historical fiction — in a good way.
The book eventually hinges on a pretty dumb “Western means brutish, Eastern means peaceful and zennnn” moment, and it throws one too many ideas into the stewpot for one paperback to reasonably deal with, but these are niggling points in what is overall a compelling, thoughtful book. I wish Brin had focused on the overall development of the communities instead of introducing a villainous survivalist supergroup for the good guys to war with, but maybe that kind of thing wouldn’t sell books.
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