Frederick Turner (1) (1943–2025)

On an artistic level, this book is an amazing accomplishment. Writing a novel in metered poetic form is not a task often undertaken, for a reason. But Turner carries it off both as a poem and as a novel. Fitting for an epic poem, the characters are are outsized and Heinleinian, both in their virtues and their their their shortcomings. But they are all distinct, interesting personalities. Also fitting for the form, Turner weaves in monologues on morality, justice, nature, and philosophy. More show more astonishing is how Turner nails the science. He gets right everything known about Mars at the time the book was written (1988), and does a thoroughly believable job laying out the terraforming effort. In iambic pentameter. Incredible. show less

Turner set a grand goal for himself in The New World: An Epic Poem -- in his words, "to demonstrate that a viable human future, a possible history, however imperfect, does lie beyond our present horizon of apparent cultural exhaustion and nuclear holocaust."

It's a curious world he conjures for a time 400 years in the future (what he deems the epic interval -- though a leap into the future rather than a look at the past as in traditional epic poems). His world seems to be an amalgam of show more post-fossil fuel high-tech, medieval warfare, 19th-century farming life, 20th-century commerce, ancient religion with its blood sacrifices, and Celtic pirates. It's an insular American future, focused specifically on the Northeast -- what is now New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The society is divided into 4 major groups. The Riots, supposedly violent matriarchies driven by psychedelic drugs have enslaved the Burbs, descendants of the suburban middle class (though the existence of these societies is merely asserted, never illustrated). The Mad Counties are religious fundamentalists who practice a kind of 17th c. Protestantism and follow a Cromwellian militancy in their own religious jihad. And the Free Counties embrace a kind of Jeffersonian agrarianism coupled with a class society based on the Vedic caste system. The Kashitrya are the political leaders and warriors, the Brahmins the priests, the Vaisyas the princes of commerce, and the Shudra the farmers. Any citizen in the Free Counties may declare a change in his caste/bur rarely will do so after his thirtieth year,/it being hard to adapt to a new code of manners,/values and skills."

The narrative focuses on the attempt of a Mad Counties alliance to defeat the Free Counties and subject them to their brand of religious fundamentalism. The Mad Counties alliance is led by a Mordred-like traitor from the Free Counties. The tale is rather a wild ride with some provocative philosophical digressions, but I think it really gets mired in its own pretensions. The characters are stereotypes at best and the action is pretty cliched. The poetry doesn't sing, except when Turner turns to nature metaphors:

But as a spider, whose web lies in the path
of an officious housemaid's duster, though starved and frail,
remakes every day a web whose beauty and symmetry
diminish each time and decay; till at last a few
tattered and ghastly strands, anchored in a knot,
a hideous shred, hang from the beam: still,
drawing out of herself the torn silk of her existence
the simmer yet renew her work of weaving;
or as the tree whose first buds were broken
in March by a frost, and fall, cased in a jewel
of ice, and whose second budding, still a brave show,
is stricken and snapped by hard winds in April,
nevertheless will put forth a third, stunted
and sickly vesture, easy prey for the beetles
and flies that riot in carnival May; so James
lifts up his head once more....

Perhaps, Turner should have stuck to the "free verse existentialist imagist lyric poem" that he dismisses as irrelevant in the introduction to his poem. show less

Written from the point of a future observer, the story starts with an incident in a play in which a minor sleight causes a clash between two rival social groups which goes on and on. In this bleak future a computer controls everything so nothing means anything. Ultra cold with bouts of sex.

The "literature" from the speculative fiction phase of the 70's has not aged well.