"}I started reading a book called\u00a0\u201cThe Angel of the Revolution\u201d (free on Project Gutenberg), and it is so\u00a0bad 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. \u00a0But Griffith is, more, uh \u2026 look, just let me summarize.
We\u2019re ten years in the future \u2013 it\u2019s 1903. \u00a0The central character is a nerdy 26-year-old dreamer who\u2019s devoted his entire life to building a heavier-than-air flying machine. \u00a0His prospects are drying up, everyone\u2019s making fun of him, but at last he succeeds in building a little scale-model airship that flies (he\u2019s discovered a chemical reaction allowing for very light fuel).
By chance, he runs into an agent of a massively powerful worldwide conspiracy called\u00a0\u201cthe Terrorists.\u201d \u00a0They seem to be left-wing anarchists of some sort, and are said to have been behind the real-life Russian nihilist movement. \u00a0But 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\u2019t like. \u00a0They have agents high up in all majors institutions, allowing them to routinely kill public figures and successfully cover up their deaths. \u00a0(They love pointing out that these are not \u201cmurders\u201d so much as \u201cexecutions,\u201d because they are bringing bad people to justice.) \u00a0They have a centralized power structure organized in circles around a single leader. \u00a0Their members obey orders from their superiors without question, up to and including sacrificing their lives. \u00a0Snitches and other betrayers are promptly and efficiently killed:
\u201cEvery 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. [\u2026]\u201d
\u201cIt\u2019s a splendid system, I should think, for discovering the movements of your enemies,\u201d 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. \u201cBut 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.\u201d
\u201cPractically 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.\u201d
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\u2019ve achieved. \u00a0Yet 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. \u00a0Rather than, you know, saying \u201chey we actually control you all, the jig\u2019s up now,\u201d or just undermining the works from the inside.
The important Terrorists all seem to be super-rich and lead opulent lifestyles. \u00a0Partially 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\u2019s still treated in the narration as awesome sexy coolness rather than a necessary evil.
Everyone talks in bombastic, Romantic speeches, and the Terrorists \u2013 who supposedly hide themselves from the world with unbroken success \u2013 are constantly tripping over themselves to reveal their true identities and explain key facets of their grand plans. \u00a0This is to a kid they\u2019ve only just met, whom they have no reason to trust, and whom they only care about because he\u2019s 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\u00a0\u201cthe coming war.\u201d \u00a0Everyone has the (correct) sense that the Great Powers are gonna have a big dust-up one of these days. \u00a0Since 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\u00a0\u201cSociety,\u201d 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 \u2013 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\u00a0structure 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 \u2013 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\u00a0people aren\u2019t actually human, so it\u2019s 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\u00a0longer men but wild beasts, whose very existence was a crime.
In what I\u2019ve read so far, not much has been said about the leader, except that his name is Natas, which you\u2019ll note is\u00a0\u201cSatan\u201d backwards. \u00a0Internet summaries tell me he has a mysterious power to control people\u2019s minds, as if this all weren\u2019t Code Geass enough already
There\u2019s been more focus on his daughter, Natasha, the titular \u201cAngel of the Revolution,\u201d who is beautiful and enchanting and yeah I\u2019m 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