Note: My read but “waiting to be reviewed pile” is growing. Short rumination/tangents/impressions are a way to get through the stack before my memory and will fades. My website partially serves as a record of what I have read and a memory apparatus for future projects. Stay tuned for more detailed and analytical reviews.

1. A Mask for the General, Lisa Goldstein (1987)

3/5 (Average)

One of many attempts to dispel fascist gloom novels I’ve been drawn to recently, Lisa Goldstein’s A Mask for a General: A Novel (1987) imagines a deliberate retreat into the “primitive” as a way to resist. The story follows Mary, a young naive teenager desperate to strike out on her own, and her encounter with Lisa, a master mask maker. In this future, in the wreckage of the University of California, Berkeley campus (the parallel to the historical role of the university in the 60s is deliberate), various “Tribes” attempt to escape the grip of The General by wearing masks and taking on new personas detached from the present. Apparently after a series of disasters, Japan has far surpassed the United States as a technological power. Considering how the world viewed Japan in the 80s, this is not a ridiculous assumption. The General controls media and has dismantled every semblance of democratic government. Mary gets drawn into a larger, rather bizarre, attempt to influence The General that might tear down the state.

I can’t say I knew much of anything about Goldstein before I picked up this novel. I found it while browsing birthdays on The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. She seems to be best known for her more fantasy novels like The Red Magician (1982) and Dark Cities Underground (1999). Here’s an interesting interview with Goldstein about her early SF inspirations (Star Trek, Arthur C. Clarke), the joy of high school detention (library with SF to read!), etc.

Ultimately, I found A Mask for a General contained a downright fascinating premise on non-traditional attempts at resistance with a ramshackle and unsatisfying delivery that weakened its originality. If a rumination on the multi-faceted possibilities of resistance appeals, check out Michael Bishop’s Stolen Faces (1977).

If you’ve read more of her work, please let me know. A Mask for a General contained unrealized promise. I waited far too long to review this one. I apologize for my vague take. That said, it goes on my list of interesting science fictional speculations on the nature of resistance.

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2. The Day of the Coastwatch, Philip McCutchan (1968)

2.5/5 (Bad)

Sometime after the 1990s, a fascist government, the “New Socialist State,” emerges out of the wreckage of the Labour and Conservative parties in the UK. A draconian coast watch prevents escapees desperate to flee Modern Britain for France or its one-time colonies of Canada and Australia. The story follows the doctor Slade, and his family, and their run-ins with the State. After Slade’s friend supposedly commits suicide in front of his own children after getting caught fleeing the country, he can can no longer hold his tongue. The outspoken Slade is hounded by the local police chief who sends him to a state-run brainwashing center. Slade returns a broken man. The mantle of resistance, and this is the only interesting element of the book, is taken on by the women in his family (his daughter, his mother, and his wife). The narrative shifts to their rather outlandish attempts to escape the country with the brainwashed font for government propaganda in tow.

While McCutchan does not directly connect his novel to the policies of the post-WWII UK Labour Party, it’s hard not read The Day of the Coastwatch (1968) as right-wing terror over Labour policies. He levels a wide-ranging, and classic, older conservative critique of the decay of traditional British values: “Modern Britain–aseptic, overbuilt, jet-noisy, State-run, controlled technological hell, a country whose gradual withdrawal into herself had led to the expulsion from the Common Market, a country that was taking drastic steps to control and limits its population and in a sense was opting out of the world” (17). As my expertise is not the history of UK politics, I feel a bit out of my league connecting the novel to anything more precise. I imagine the novel could also be read as a response to the radical social changes that occurred in Swinging London and the 60s.

Why did I read the novel? Good question. I like hunting through the esoteric. And McCutchan is one of the rare British SF writers that I’ve been able to find that touches on issues of organized labor in the immediate post-WWII period (along with E. C. Tubb and a few others). McCutchan presents the labor movement as no longer having a defined function in protecting workers, and instead, a key element of the creation of the New Socialist State. Also, while strangely progressive as the narrative shifts almost entirely to the women in Slade’s family who are actually responsible for taking real action, McCutchan falls victim to the standard trope of homosexual villains.

I can’t recommend this one unless you’re in the mood for a lesser-known fascist future-style dystopia. I vaguely preferred McCutchan’s post-apocalyptic nuclear war novel A Time for Survival (1966). And also, if you have an interested in planned communities in science fiction, The Day of the Coastwatch contains a fascinating explanation of a “green” planned city that sounds quite utopian amidst all the industrial sprawl he describes (152-153).

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