Adrian Tchaikovsky - Ironclads

In the not to distant future, US troops use the British Isles as a jumping off point to fight a violent, internecine war on the European landmass. It is a savage conflict, with high tech hiding a brutal reality. Ordinary troops die, or are maimed in their thousands, while an elite officer class sit safe in their 21st century armoured "scion" skins, directing and effectively playing at being knights of the realm. They are near invulnerable, a class whom, like the knights of old made "a game of how many poor bastards they could cut up". So says Sturgeon, one of a small group of troops who have been chosen for an impossible mission.

The narrator is less sure. They're here to do a job - in this case rescue a downed scion, lost behind enemy lines. Sturgeon's history lessons niggle at the team's minds. Is it a mission they have been specially chosen for? Are they just pawns? Is there something else going on? And anyway who has the tech to actually down a scion?

Ironclads follows the team into the fray. It's a short novel that packs a lot in - partly because of its subject matter. The nature of the conflict feels much more like that in Ukraine, though it was published a few years before that slaughterhouse began. These years we are more used to highly powerful countries pulverising smaller, poorer nations. But this is a book about modern conflict in a high-tech world.

So there's lots of technology - AIs, drones, robots. But humans still get blown to pieces quite a lot. So this is military science fiction with a lot of human values in it. But, like much of Tchaikovsky's other work, it is also a deeply political novel. Sturgeon, in one of his history lessons, explains how Britain broke off from Europe, and in the ensuing economic catastophe, found itself even more closely aligned with the interests of the US. But the rest of Europe was following a different path. If the US was diving deep into a high tech, neoliberal, theocracy (the Church of Christ Libertarian!), then Europe was enjoying the fruits of state intervention, green technology and keeping the wealthy in check. 

The war, when it comes, is fought for the US multinationals who want to make sure they get back their slice of the pie, and smash the incipient European socialism. The scions aren't military top brass, they're the corporate heads who are really pulling the strings, and they have much deeper interests. There are thus some excellent jokes. As the narrator complains, "I got shelled by the 1st fighting corps of fucking Ikea last year!" 

Here Tschaikovsky has dialled up the imperialist narrative. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, US neoliberal Thomas Friedman said that ‘the hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas. The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US army, air force, navy and Marine Corps.’ But this is not the hidden hand. Here the multinationals have merged and taken over the military. They are the warmongers. But, ironically, war is not actually that profitable if you are blowing apart your own sub-companies, emerging markets and resources.

The imperialism depicted in Ironclads is not really that different to the monopoly capitalism lying behind World War One that Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg wrote about. Good political science fiction doesn't always have to wear its politics on its sleeve. Adrian Tchaikovsky's done a very good job indeed here of placing some really interesting ideas at the heart of a very hard military science fiction work. Highly recommended.

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