Ha Ha Ha, This Thing. I Actually Read The Angel Of The Revolution About A Decade Ago When I Was In My

Ha ha ha, this thing. I actually read The Angel of the Revolution about a decade ago when I was in my steampunk phase. What I mostly remember about Angel is its gleeful Russophobia. The Terrorists see the autocracy and cruelty of the Russian Empire as the greatest threat to the free peoples of the world, and when Tsar Alexander III (remember, written in 1893) acquires a fleet of airships in his quest to dominate Europe, he becomes the ultimate enemy the Terrorists have to defeat. There’s a lot in this book that’s objectionable to modern eyes, but the one that sticks with me is a bit near the middle where the Terrorists are flying over St. Petersburg and just decide to blast Kronstadt off the face of the Earth on a whim. My memory is hazy, but I think there’s also an extended sequence in a hidden mountain plateau in Ethiopia where the Terrorists have their main base, and we sort veer into some late 19th century-vintage mysticism. There’s also a sequel, Olga Romanoff from 1894, which can also be read at Project Gutenberg over here. This one picks up in the year 2030, in a world that has been peacefully unified for generations under the patient stewardship of the Terrorists, who now call themselves “Aerians”, and their airships. However, the pax aeronautica is broken by the titular Olga Romanoff, descendant of the defeated Alexander III and a diabolical mesmerist, who aims to avenge Tsarist Russia’s defeat by allying with the forces of Islam and challenging the Aerians for control of the planet. Then in the end the Earth passes through a comet’s tail and everyone is killed by poison gas, but a few Aerians survive in underground shelters to reemerge and repopulate the world. So, yeah. To put it as nicely as possible, The Angel of the Revolution and Olga Romanoff are products of the culture and era that made them, and they do not transcend that culture and era. They’re not the sort of thing you’d read if you don’t have a scholarly interest in that particular form of British sf known as “scientific romances”. Perhaps the most interesting thing about them to a modern reader is that they put some of H.G. Wells’s own stories into context. Wells’s own The War in the Air (1908) in particular feels very much like a response to Griffith’s novels. (And wouldn’t you know it, The War in the Air is also available on Project Gutenberg right here!). While Wells’s novel has its own prejudices and blind spots as well, it undercuts the power fantasy of Griffith’s novels by showing both the horror of saturation bombing along with its inability to be decisive on its own, and the war just drags on until all industrial civilization is destroyed and humanity is driven back to subsistence farming.

I started reading a book called “The Angel of the Revolution” (free on Project Gutenberg), and it is so bad 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.  But Griffith is, more, uh … look, just let me summarize.

We’re ten years in the future – it’s 1903.  The central character is a nerdy 26-year-old dreamer who’s devoted his entire life to building a heavier-than-air flying machine.  His prospects are drying up, everyone’s making fun of him, but at last he succeeds in building a little scale-model airship that flies (he’s discovered a chemical reaction allowing for very light fuel).

By chance, he runs into an agent of a massively powerful worldwide conspiracy called “the Terrorists.”  They seem to be left-wing anarchists of some sort, and are said to have been behind the real-life Russian nihilist movement.  But 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’t like.  They have agents high up in all majors institutions, allowing them to routinely kill public figures and successfully cover up their deaths.  (They love pointing out that these are not “murders” so much as “executions,” because they are bringing bad people to justice.)  They have a centralized power structure organized in circles around a single leader.  Their members obey orders from their superiors without question, up to and including sacrificing their lives.  Snitches and other betrayers are promptly and efficiently killed:

“Every 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. […]”

“It’s a splendid system, I should think, for discovering the movements of your enemies,” 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. “But 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.”

“Practically 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.”

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’ve achieved.  Yet 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.  Rather than, you know, saying “hey we actually control you all, the jig’s up now,” or just undermining the works from the inside.

The important Terrorists all seem to be super-rich and lead opulent lifestyles.  Partially 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’s still treated in the narration as awesome sexy coolness rather than a necessary evil.

Everyone talks in bombastic, Romantic speeches, and the Terrorists – who supposedly hide themselves from the world with unbroken success – are constantly tripping over themselves to reveal their true identities and explain key facets of their grand plans.  This is to a kid they’ve only just met, whom they have no reason to trust, and whom they only care about because he’s 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 “the coming war.”  Everyone has the (correct) sense that the Great Powers are gonna have a big dust-up one of these days.  Since 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 “Society,” 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 – 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 structure 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 – 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 people aren’t actually human, so it’s 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 longer men but wild beasts, whose very existence was a crime.

In what I’ve read so far, not much has been said about the leader, except that his name is Natas, which you’ll note is “Satan” backwards.  Internet summaries tell me he has a mysterious power to control people’s minds, as if this all weren’t Code Geass enough already

There’s been more focus on his daughter, Natasha, the titular “Angel of the Revolution,” who is beautiful and enchanting and yeah I’m 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