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Eclipse Penumbra, John Shirley

The first book of A Song Called Youth, Eclipse (1985, USA), set up the situation, but I’m not entirely convinced the sequels were originally intended. They’ve been subsequently rewritten at least twice, so they’re certainly a thing now. There’s also a shift in tone between book one and book two. Having said that, these books have in some respects proved scarily prescient.

Europe has been invaded by the New-Soviets, but the Americans defeated them – well, that version of Nato which exists in the minds of most Americans that is 99% American and apparently also funds all of Europe’s healthcare, education, etc. The Second Alliance, a Christian far right security company, has taken over policing Europe, but they’re actually working to turn Europe into a white supremacist state under their leadership. They’re being fought by the New Resistance, now based in Malta after escaping France. There’s also a space colony, which has been taken over by SA after an internal revolt; it’s also being blockaded by the New-Soviets.

Eclipse had a 1980s cyberpunk feel. One character was a famous guitarist, and died jamming on top of the Arc de Triomphe as it was attacked by giant steampunk-ish wheel tanks. Eclipse Penumbra (1988, USA) dials all this back and goes for straight-up future war. We have a handful of viewpoint characters in the NR, and through them we see several military actions against the SA. In the space colony, the SA administration takes one step too far when it packs a maintenance shuttle with dissidents and non-whites and blows it up in an “accident”. This prompts the head of security to flip sides – although he’d already seen the writing on the wall, and it didn’t bode well for him.

Meanwhile, the NR leadership has managed to get hold of some incriminating footage of a SA bigwig and the US president. Smoke, the jaded writer with the pet crow from Eclipse (another cyberpunk-ish touch), is making a name for himself back in the US as a pundit. The NR campaign finally swings US public opinion against SA, and the president. It helps that one of the other SA bigwigs has infiltrated an assassin into the SA headquarters – and he successfully takes out the organisation’s messianic leader…

So, a hopeful ending. Of sorts. SA seems to be on its way out. The space colony is free once again. The NR has beaten the SA in southern Europe. The New-Soviets are retreating, but Europe is still in a mess – and the stateside SA are still planning on turning it into a white supremacist superstate.

In many respects, Shirley has stayed ahead of the current global situation, even given the last update of this trilogy was 26 years ago. The US in the book is just as big a bin fire as the US is today (arguably it’s been one throughout its history, it just has excellent PR), but Shirley’s version of Europe owes more to American ignorance of, and misinformation about, Europe than the reality. It’s the US that’s collapsing IRL, not the EU. I suppose it’s hardly surprising Shirley is closer with his future US.

The end of Eclipse Penumbra doesn’t give much of a clue where the third book, Eclipse Corona (1990, USA) is likely to go. The “corona” in the title, incidentally, is extremely unlikely to have anything to do with a virus. But we shall see. So far the trilogy is proving solid Shirley without really standing out. I’ve a feeling Eclipse’s time has passed and, despite updates and rewrites, it will never recapture that. Which leaves A Song Called Youth in a strange place.


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Eclipse, John Shirley

I read Eclipse (1985, USA) some time back in the 1990s, I think, or it might have been the late 1980s. It was originally published in 1985, but the edition I read this year was the 1999 revised edition. It’s the first of a trilogy, A Song Called Youth, followed by Eclipse Penumbra (1988, USA) and Eclipse Corona (1990, USA). For some reason, I never got around to reading books two and three.

I’ve read a lot of fiction by John Shirley over the years. He was one of the authors I fastened onto during the late 1980s, for reasons I no longer remember. He’s had an… interesting career (there’s a good interview with him from February this year on Boing Boing: here). His output has been large, including quite a lot of work-for-hire novelisations, but the quality has been variable. His works are mostly science fiction or horror, with the odd fantasy. His good stuff is definitely worth reading, the rest not so much.

Fortunately, Eclipse is one of the good ones. It’s part-cyberpunk, part-WW3, and part-punk rock. It’s set some time around the middle of this century. After Putin’s death, Russia invaded Europe. Meanwhile, fascism is on the rise everywhere in the West. There’s a space habitat called the Colony in orbit, and a high-tech floating sovereign city in the Mediterranean called Freezone. A private security company called Second Alliance has been contracted to police the war-torn cities of western Europe. Second Alliance is run by a cabal of right-wing Christian fascists, and is deeply racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and anti-Islamic. There is a small resistance trying to prevent them. The novel follows a handful of characters from the resistance: in Paris, in the Colony, and infiltrated into Second Alliance’s leadership.

If parts of this sound familiar, it’s worth remembering the novel was originally published in 1985. And even the revised edition is twenty-seven years old. Of course, there’s nothing new about fascism, and the US has been a bin fire since it was founded… In the real world, the Russian invasion was limited to Ukraine, and Israel has proven to be a rogue nation rather than a settling influence on the Middle East. And, of course, there was 9/11 and the War on Terror. True, a lot of Shirley’s world-building in Eclipse is fairly typical of cyberpunk post-war fiction of the 1980s, and it’s scary how close to present-day reality some of it is. 

Of course, back then, cyberpunk was about the tech – the capitalism run wild, or World War 3, were just setting – and here Eclipse is a little wider of the mark. It’s probably the only thing in the book that dates it – well, that and the punk rock aesthetic, which didn’t last much past the 1990s. Nonetheless, it still reads pretty well.