A very provoking book. A prescient satire, with a deus ex machina. A number of sympathetic characters.

A sort of madness overcame us; we had an infinity of bullets and an infinity of Chinese before us. Every one of our men felt he was killing thousands. Our infantry fired ever round the teamsters could carry to them; they fired until the raindrops sizzled on the rifle barrels. Death ran wild. How terrible it is, I thought, that the Yukons should be so good at this.

It is the early 26th century and the Yukon Confederacy (whose lands include North America, Australia, Greenland, Iceland and the British isles) is the most powerful country in the world. From its beginnings as a agrarian organisation based in North America, To start with I was surprised to see references to knights and hereditary lords, the Union Jack, and money being referred to as pounds and quid, but I soon realised that this must be due to the Yukon Confederacy wanting to distinguish itself from the American government that it replaced.

There is a steampunk feel to Yukon technology, since an emp field produced by satellites prevents the use of electricity on earth, and zeppelins are used for most long distance travel, as there are limitations to how high and fast steam-powered aeroplanes can fly. However, the Yukons have made advances in other areas, particularly with regard to technology with military applications, since they are a warlike society, whose men spend much of their lives in the armed forces. The human life span has also increased, with many citizens of the Yukon Confederacy living to 120 or more, as long as they avoid dying in an epidemic, being killed in a war, or being assassinated. A woman who died aged 81 is described as having died tragically early.

The memoirs of the General Sir Robert Mayfair Bruce paint a dark portrait of national hero Lord Isaac Prophet Fitzpatrick, Consul of the Yukon confederacy Robert and Fitz met when they were student officers at the War College, and Robert continually found himself compromising his ideals as Fitz consolidated his power and embarked on his plan to conquer the whole world.

Robert paints his close friend as a megalomaniac whose evil deeds were whitewashed after his death, while the historian who is re-publishing the memoirs in the late 26th century, apologises for publishing a scurrilous pack of lies written by a malicious and traitorous fantasist
. His copious footnotes draw attention to all the places that the memoirs disagree with the historical record, but reader can draw their own conclusion!

I had never heard of this author before finding this book on a BookCrossing bookshelf, but I found this book extremely enjoyable, even though military science fiction is not usually my thing. The one thing I didn't like so much was Robert's strange and submissive relationship with his wife Charlotte, which I found jarring. Overall this book wouldn't have been half as good if it had been presented as an ordinary novel; the historian's introduction and footnotes really make the book worth reading. ( )

Here is our future, writ large upon the bones of those who came before. Read it and weep. ( )

I read this the week before the U.S. elections of 2004, and it was entirely too depressing for that reason--that doesn't make this bad, just rather sobering. The jacket copy was actually informative, for once. This book is about how history is not only written by the victors; if the victory is sufficient enough, history can be altered. This is a future in which engineers rule in secret, and a ruralist religious government controls the world in the wake of devastating biological warfare. A young leader attempting to recreate the glory of Alexander the Great comes to power. One of his close associates writes a damning memoir (the text of the novel itself) which was evidently not believed. He went beyond the strictures of his society, and the victors couldn’t deal with it.