book review: "The Syndic" by C.M. Kornbluth

TRX
08-10-2010
Back in 1953 C.M. Kornbluth wrote a science fiction story called "The Syndic." I first read it in 1974 or so, then again sometime in the early '90s. The story wasn't all that good, but the book never quite made it to the "must go to make more room" pile during culling sessions. Last night I pulled it off the shelf and read it again.

In 1953 popular fiction was much shorter than it is now. "The Syndic" would barely make a novella now. "Big picture" stories were rare; what would now be spread out over a trilogy or tetralogy would be reduced to a sketchy background. Unfortunately, "The Syndic" is all about the background, with a generic spy and boy-meets-girl storyline plastered over the top.

"The Syndic" takes place around 2100-ish. A hundred years before, an alliance between the Mob and the Syndicate overthrew the US Government. Economic backlash collapsed the governments of most of the rest of the world, all the way back to hunter-gatherer societies in some areas. Meanwhile, the Syndicate (shortened to Syndic) ran the former US east of the Mississippi, while the Mob ran the rest and what used to be Canada. The remains of the military and the Fed are the "North American Government", effectively pirates and raiders operating from bases in Ireland.

Both the Mob and the Syndic are basically family oligarchies. The Mob is run by the Regans, the Syndic by the Falcaros. What we're shown of Mob Territory looks eerily familiar - crushing inflation, heavy taxation, an incomprehensibly complex legal system with horrendous penalties for any minor infraction, rule of whim instead of rule of law, ID cards, travel permits.

The Syndic, by comparison, is much different. The Falcaro's laissez-faire government isn't quite Libertarian, though it's probably a close as a monarchy can get. It operates on the principle of "give the people what they want and keep them happy." 1960s-style 'free love', government-backed gambling (more fun than taxes!), unrestricted healthcare... a popular sport is "polo", which is played with hot-rodded Jeeps sporting twin .50 caliber machine guns; you use the bullets to direct a two-foot steel ball through the goal, hopefully without shooting too many of your teammates. Can't get much sportier than that.

Yes, there are a whole lot of "well, but..." objections to the backstory. Kornbluth was aware of them; most of the story takes place in Mob territory, which is pretty much like the 21st century USA, and in a North American Government base in Ireland, which is like East Germany in the 1960s, except not nearly as fun. Most of what we learn about the Syndic is when characters compare how lousy it is in Chicago or Ireland compared to back home.

At the end the lovers/spies bring back proof that the Mob and NAG have allied to crush the Syndic, and the story stops. I think Kornbluth realized he'd written himself into a hole, so he tied a knot in it and mailed it off to the publisher.

It's a 1953 paperback. The pages are brown and starting to crumble. The covers came out as I was reading it. I stuck it back on the shelf.

This time around, what struck me was the author's (well, characters') commentaries on how governments grabbed power and interfered with the lives of their citizens. 1953 - the tail end of the reconversion from "total war" to civilian production, except those "resources" and "materials" boards didn't go away, they just changed their names. There were war profiteering trials going on, and the Fed was cranking down on Communists again. The book merged that with current events - at the time Kornbluth was writing it, the Kefauver Commission on organized crime was big news nationwide.

It's not a great book, or even a good book, but it's one of those books you read, and you really wish the author had been able to take things a bit farther.