Book Review: Resurrection Day
14 February, 2007Any person interested in history is often consumed with the thought of “what might have been”. What would have happened if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo? What if the French had settled what is now the Eastern Seaboard of the United States of America? What if the Maori had never signed the Treaty of Waitangi? Alternative History provides a rich vein of imaginative ideas for storytelling, exploited with great cunning by many a fiction author. Some, such as Robert Harris' Fatherland which poses the question of what would have happened to Europe and the Holocaust if the Nazi's had won World War Two, are considered masterpieces. Resurrection Day, by Brendan DuBois, deserves the same acclamation.
Resurrection Day is set some ten years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, centred around the the character of Carl Landry. The difference between our history and the history of Resurrection Day is the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In our timeline, President Kennedy enforced a blockade, resisted pressure to attack Cuba when a U2 reconnaissance plane was shot down, and negotiated a withdrawal of the Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba. In the timeline of Resurrection Day however, things go drastically wrong. An aggressive U.S. General takes matters into his own hands and retaliates for the downing of the craft, leading to an invasion, a nuclear exchange, and the deaths of millions of Americans as a result. Resurrection Day is set in the aftermath of this war, in which the surviving members of President Kennedy's administration are war criminals, and the U.S. is reduced to being a semi-despotic Second World state reliant on the goodwill of the U.K. while the European Powers reassume their dominance of the globe. Continue Reading >>
