Tom Kratman's A Desert Called Peace is a military science-fiction adventure laced with moral philosophy, a dash of political satire, and a boatload of promised vengeance. The story centers on a man named Patrick Hennessy, living on a planet called Terra Nova five centuries in the future. The planet of Terra Nova, discovered in the 2030s and colonized extensively in the decades following, is by Hennessy's time a teeming world of nearly twelve billion people. Rather than being a monocultural colonial world of the type so often portrayed in science fiction, Terra Nova is a world of more than two hundred ethnically, linguistically, and racially diverse nations, the strongest of which is a country called the Federated States of Columbia (FSC), originally founded by American colonists. The FSC by this time is engaged in the early stages of a war against a new generation of Terra Novan Islamic fanatics known as Salafis.
Hennessy, a veteran of the Federated States Army, is living in the tropical nation of Balboa (a country much like Panama). He is married to a Balboan woman named Linda with whom he has three children and a fourth on the way. Hennessy's world comes crashing down around him when his wife and children are killed during a massive terrorist attack on the Columbian city of First Landing. After enduring months of grief (and anger), Hennessy vows to avenge the deaths of his wife and children by taking the war to those who perpetrated the atrocity. But he does this not by rejoining the Federated States Army, but by creating his own private army in Balboa with the tacit (if reluctant) approval of that country's civilian leaders.
In the course of founding this private army, which he names the Legion del Cid, Hennessy takes the surname of his late wife and Hispanicizes his first name, re-christening himself Patricio Carrera. We see Carrera build his army from the ground up, creating a fighting force capable of going after the Salafi fanatics and their allies and led by men willing to be just as ruthless as they.
When the Legion is hired by the FSC they are deployed not to Pashtia – the heart of Salafi operations – but to Sumer, a country with a long political tradition of fascist, autocratic rule run by a dictator who, though not a Salafist, has been offering Salafists safe harbor.
The x-factor in all of this is a military force from Old Earth known as the United Earth Peace Fleet (UEPF) – the military arm of a global earth government known as the Consensus, which is something of an amalgamation of the old United Nations and European Union. Under Consensus rule, Earth has devolved into a moribund, caste-divided society that is no longer able to even reproduce the technology that brought mankind to the stars centuries before. The purpose of the UEPF is to keep the Terra Novans (particularly those from the FSC) in check, lest they take to the stars someday, return to Earth, and overthrow the Consensus.
To that end, the UEPF and cosmopolitan progressives (referred to as Kosmos) within the FSC and the continent of Taurus find common cause with the Salafists in trying to ensure that the FSC and the Legion del Cid do not succeed in their objective of quelling the military threat posed by this new wave of Islamic fanaticism. Thus, what you have in addition to the heart-pounding military combat is behind-the-scenes political maneuvering, philosophical discussion of the law of war, and wry commentary on our present military and political scenes. As was the case with Harry Turtledove's Darkness series of a few years back, part of the fun with Kratman's Carrera universe is trying to figure out who certain characters (like Gen. Norman Thomas, for instance) may correspond to in the real world.
It isn't often that I find myself struck with the revelation of a basic truth on a novel's first page, but that was the case here. Before the prologue, in a short letter to his readers, Kratman advises that those reading his novel "can look at it as a cautionary tale on choosing one's enemies well…because you are going to become much like them or because they're going to become much like you." That is certainly sobering advice for those (like me) who are in career fields wherein they find themselves badly outnumbered by their ideological opponents. But then again, to paraphrase a nazrani cleric from Kratman's Caliphate, turnabout is fair play.
The story of Carrera and his Legion is continued in Carnifex, which I am reading right now and will review once finished.
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Today at Missoulapolis, Carol "Cassandra" Minjares put up a post celebrating her first bloggaversary! Congratulations, Carol!
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