After the Downfall

Lin’s revenge. That thought kept recurring as I read Flashback, the latest novel by the inimitable Dan Simmons. Who is this “Lin” of whom I speak? Lin Zexu: a scholar and law enforcement official in Qing Dynasty-era China, assigned to the city of Guangdong as an imperial commissioner in 1838 to halt the sale and distribution of illegal drugs, namely opium. Lin was remarkably successful in doing so, and he not only went after Chinese distributors, but Western ones as well. It is estimated that more than two-and-a half million pounds of opium were seized and destroyed as a result of Lin’s activities. He was, essentially, a Chinese version of Eliot Ness.

The British, however, were none too pleased with this development and responded violently, initiating what became known as the First Opium War (1839-42). China was defeated, Lin was exiled, and the Chinese people remained awash in opium, helplessly seeing their country dismembered – carved into spheres of influence – by a multitude of foreign powers over the succeeding decades.

It is a similar scenario which Simmons presents to his reader within the pages of Flashback. The year is 2032, and the Union has been dissolved. Oh, there is still a United States of America, but it is bankrupt, reduced in size, and governed by a select group of “foreign advisors” in concert with a weakened federal government. At least four states have left the Union: Hawaii (subsequently annexed by a resurgent Japanese Empire), Arizona and New Mexico (which along with southern California are part of a new country named Nuevo Mexico), and Texas (once again an independent republic). Even worse, the vast majority of Americans do not care. 87% of the population is addicted to a cheap drug called flashback, which enables its users to relive cherished memories as their society crumbles around them.

The main character of the novel is a flashback-addicted ex-cop, living in Denver, named Nick Bottom. The reader meets Bottom as a broken man, haunted by the death of his wife six years prior, estranged from his teenage son Val, and frustrated by an unsolved murder investigation that destroyed his career. But things change when the Japanese federal advisor in Denver – whose son was the murder victim in the aforementioned investigation – calls Bottom out of his involuntary retirement to revisit the case as a private investigator.

The other viewpoint characters in the story are Nick’s son Val and Nick’s father-in-law Leonard Fox, an emeritus professor of English retired from UCLA, with whom Val lives in a Los Angeles torn apart by ethnic strife. As Nick revisits his old investigation and finds that his deceased wife may have had something to do with the murder, Val and Leonard take flight from LA as the city descends into anarchy, braving the nearly-impassable American Southwest to reunite with Nick.

Along the way, both with Nick’s investigation and with Val and Leonard’s desperate flight, Simmons slowly reveals his broken, dystopic America to his readers. Simmons’ imagined America of the future is a place where every negative socioeconomic and political trend of the present has been taken to its most negative result. I’ll not spoil matters by revealing further details on that point, but as I read through the novel I kept asking: how plausible could Simmons’ dystopia really be? The unsettling answer: very. It *could* happen here because it *did* happen there. The China of the past may well be the America of the future.

I’ve gone on longer than I intended, but before concluding I must take issue with what a gaggle of leftist commenters have been posting on the Amazon page for Flashback. They are unjustly, dishonestly, and maliciously smearing Simmons as a xenophobe and a racist. That characterization is absolutely false, but all-too-typical of the adherents of a bankrupt ideology that can only defend their faith with hatred and invective. Anyone who is a regular reader of the novels of Dan Simmons knows that he is neither a racist nor a xenophobe. But don’t take my word for it. Read his novels Hyperion (1986) and Black Hills (2010) and you will see I am correct.

Flashback is Simmons’ coming-out-conservative novel, and it is well worth your time to read. With an ending that is evocative of Pedro Calderon de la Barca, it is a story you will not soon forget.