This book tells the story of John Rolfe, son of an old Virginia family whose fortunes have declined, who leaves the army in 1946 wounded in one leg and with no obvious future, and rents a house in Oakland, California.
By pure luck, he finds in the house a gateway to another world: an alternate world of lower technology, in which the Americas have never been settled by Europeans, and remained inhabited only by Red Indians and wild animals.
Quickly seeing much personal opportunity in this discovery, he reveals it only to selected friends and family members.
They go over and find gold in the alternate California, naturally occurring wherever it was found historically in our own world.
Rolfe christens his new country New Virginia, and his happy band begin to refer to their original world as FirstSide.
Converting raw gold from New Virginia into FirstSide wealth isn't straightforward, but it can be done, and they find ways to do it. With their FirstSide wealth, they can buy equipment and hire employees to settle very comfortably in New Virginia, while keeping the whole operation unknown to anyone on FirstSide.
Most of the Red Indians are killed by infectious diseases to which they have no resistance (as happened in our own history), and the survivors don't represent a serious threat to New Virginians armed with twentieth-century weapons.
What we have here seems such a classic sf scenario that I feel it should have been done many times before; and yet I can't think of any prior example. If no other author has ever thought of it, I find that odd; and yet some things don't become obvious until someone points them out.
Rolfe has been given a new world to settle; he and his friends can easily make themselves masters of it. What they choose to do with it is very much up to them, and it really depends on what sort of a man Rolfe is, because he chooses the others. In this book, Rolfe is a Virginian wannabe aristocrat, who proceeds to set himself and his friends up as aristocrats. They become the Thirty Families of New Virginia: between them, they own all the land, most of the industrial base, and above all they own the gateway. The other people they bring in are known as Settlers, but they're basically peasants, expected to do the low- and mid-level jobs and not cause any trouble. For security reasons — in order to keep the gateway secret on FirstSide — they're not allowed to use the gateway, so none of them will ever see FirstSide again.
The remarkable thing is that they never seem to cause any trouble: indeed, they all seem quite content with their humdrum jobs and rural/suburban lives. Rolfe grants them an elected assembly (apparently as an act of benevolence), but the real power remains with the heads of the Thirty Families.
The Settlers aren't all-American: Rolfe sometimes finds people from other countries who are keen to escape from FirstSide for one reason or another. But he doesn't bring in any black people, with a few accidental exceptions; he reckons that decision didn't work out well last time, and he aims to avoid the mistakes of his ancestors.
Perhaps his most bizarre decision is to import lots of large animals not native to North America — including lions, tigers, elephants, and hippos — and release them into the countryside. He likes hunting, and treats New Virginia as his own safari park.
Bearing in mind that Stirling could have made Rolfe any kind of man at all, and could have had any kind of political setup in New Virginia, it's difficult to understand why he chose that kind of man and therefore that kind of political setup. Was it in order to tell the best story? No: the plot of the book isn't particularly inspired, and an equally good story could have been written with any kind of political setup. Was it in order to make interesting criticisms of Rolfe's political setup? No: he doesn't make any. In fact, much of the book seems designed to convince us how attractive New Virginia is and how happy everyone is there.
He could have shown us:
- A Settler newly arrived in New Virginia, bewildered and angry on discovering that he can never return to FirstSide (although members of the Thirty Families can). It would be nice to explain the situation fully to Settlers before they decide to immigrate; but that's not really feasible, firstly for security reasons, and secondly because they probably wouldn't believe it.
- A Settler family whose child has just been killed and eaten by one of the dangerous animals that Rolfe imported for his own amusement.
- The elected assembly debating motions critical of the Thirty Families and of the whole setup.
- A member of the Thirty Families killed by an extremist Settler faction; reprisals against Settlers; increasing Settler disaffection following the reprisals.
But none of this appears. Instead, the main conflict in the book consists of an attempted coup by some members of the Thirty Families, who like New Virginia as much as anyone, but want even more power over it than they have already.
This is a readable book that passes the time well enough, but I found it rather disappointing after The Peshawar Lancers; firstly because there's much less plot (a substantial chunk of the book is little more than a guided tour around New Virginia), and secondly because the promising scenario is developed in such an eccentric way. Characterization and writing style are good by the general standards of sf, but the characters are somewhat less appealing than in The Peshawar Lancers.
Rather oddly and jarringly, Stirling quotes Larry Niven at the front of the book, in the acknowledgments:
“There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is ‘idiot.’”
Apparently he wants to insist that John Rolfe's politics are not to be confused with his own, but there are more polite ways of saying so. Describing even some of your readers as idiots is not a good start to a book. Furthermore, if Stirling is at all averse to Rolfe's politics, his uncritical and admiring description of New Virginia is a funny way of showing it. A few members of the Thirty Families are presented as baddies, but that's not a criticism of the system. John Rolfe himself is presented as a sort of lovable-rogue type: he's ruthless but kind-hearted at the same time, and look at the results he gets. This is how any authoritarian leader would like to be portrayed.
Written in February 2008