nostalgebraist:

I started reading a book called “The Angel of the Revolution” (free on Project Gutenberg), and it is so bad in the most fascinating way

It was written in 1893 by this guy named George Griffith, who was a lot like H. G. Wells, writing near-future science fiction that combined technological speculation, adventure, and a socialist message.  But Griffith is, more, uh … look, just let me summarize.

We’re ten years in the future – it’s 1903.  The central character is a nerdy 26-year-old dreamer who’s devoted his entire life to building a heavier-than-air flying machine.  His prospects are drying up, everyone’s making fun of him, but at last he succeeds in building a little scale-model airship that flies (he’s discovered a chemical reaction allowing for very light fuel).

By chance, he runs into an agent of a massively powerful worldwide conspiracy called “the Terrorists.”  They seem to be left-wing anarchists of some sort, and are said to have been behind the real-life Russian nihilist movement.  But their ideology itself is rarely talked about and only then in platitudes, while on nearly every page there is a loving authorial focus on their methods.

Their main form of activity seems to be arranging the killing of people they don’t like.  They have agents high up in all majors institutions, allowing them to routinely kill public figures and successfully cover up their deaths.  (They love pointing out that these are not “murders” so much as “executions,” because they are bringing bad people to justice.)  They have a centralized power structure organized in circles around a single leader.  Their members obey orders from their superiors without question, up to and including sacrificing their lives.  Snitches and other betrayers are promptly and efficiently killed:

“Every one of the cabs is fitted with a telephonic arrangement communicating with the roof. The driver has only to button the wire of the transmitter up inside his coat so that the transmitter itself lies near to his ear, and he can hear even a whisper inside the cab. […]”

“It’s a splendid system, I should think, for discovering the movements of your enemies,” said Arnold, not without an uncomfortable reflection on the fact that he was himself now completely in the power of this terrible organisation, which had keen eyes and ready hands in every capital of the civilised world. “But how do you guard against treachery? It is well known that all the Governments of Europe are spending money like water to unearth this mystery of the Terror. Surely all your men cannot be incorruptible.”

“Practically they are so. The very mystery which enshrouds all our actions makes them so. We have had a few traitors, of course; but as none of them has ever survived his treachery by twenty-four hours, a bribe has lost its attraction for the rest.”

In fact, they sound exactly like a one world government, and despite being a bunch of anarchists who want all governments to be destroyed, they revel in the control they’ve achieved.  Yet their chosen method of destroying all governments is this targeted murder campaign which is carefully made to look like the work of many diffuse and weak activist groups.  Rather than, you know, saying “hey we actually control you all, the jig’s up now,” or just undermining the works from the inside.

The important Terrorists all seem to be super-rich and lead opulent lifestyles.  Partially this is because they need to pretend to be normal powerful people, and super-rich leaders are used as an explanation for how the Terrorists got so much power, but it’s still treated in the narration as awesome sexy coolness rather than a necessary evil.

Everyone talks in bombastic, Romantic speeches, and the Terrorists – who supposedly hide themselves from the world with unbroken success – are constantly tripping over themselves to reveal their true identities and explain key facets of their grand plans.  This is to a kid they’ve only just met, whom they have no reason to trust, and whom they only care about because he’s built a tiny flying machine that they believe will scale up to military use (because he says so).

There is a lot of talk about “the coming war.”  Everyone has the (correct) sense that the Great Powers are gonna have a big dust-up one of these days.  Since a bloody conflagration is going to happen one way or the other, might as well have it in the Good way, the one that fully destroys “Society,” so it can be followed by, um, something:

After that, if the course to be determined on by the Terrorist Council failed to arrive at the results which it was designed to reach, the armies of Europe would fight their way through the greatest war that the world had ever seen, the Fates would once more decide in favour of the strongest battalions, the fittest would triumph, and a new era of military despotism would begin – perhaps neither much better nor much worse than the one it would succeed.

If, on the other hand, the plans of the Terrorists were successfully worked out to their logical conclusion, it would not be war only, but utter destruction that Society would have to face. And then with dissolution would come anarchy. The thrones of the world would be overthrown, the fabric of Society would be dissolved, commerce would come to an end, the structure that it had taken twenty centuries of the discipline of war and the patient toil of peace to build up, would crumble into ruins in a few short months, and then – well, after that no man could tell what would befall the remains of the human race that had survived the deluge. The means of destruction were at hand, and they would be used without mercy, but for the rest no man could speak.

Our protagonist worries for a sec about brutal extrajudicial murder, but handily remembers that violent people aren’t actually human, so it’s OK to kill them:

Colston spoke in a cold, passionless, merciless tone, just as a lawyer might speak of a criminal condemned to die by the ordinary process of the law, and as Arnold heard him he shuddered. But at the same time the picture in the Council-chamber came up before his mental vision, and he was forced to confess that men who could so far forget their manhood as to lash a helpless woman up to a triangle and flog her till her flesh was cut to ribbons, were no longer men but wild beasts, whose very existence was a crime.

In what I’ve read so far, not much has been said about the leader, except that his name is Natas, which you’ll note is “Satan” backwards.  Internet summaries tell me he has a mysterious power to control people’s minds, as if this all weren’t Code Geass enough already

There’s been more focus on his daughter, Natasha, the titular “Angel of the Revolution,” who is beautiful and enchanting and yeah I’m sure you can fill this part in even if I stop typing

Apparently the rest of the book is about the Terrorists building flying war machines and fighting a big war against everyone, which they eventually win, which somehow means that War Has Ended Forever