At first it might seem strange that the dystopian future United States would deliberately let criminals prey on its honest citizens, since this looks like a challenge to the government's authority. Actually, this is a tried and true tactic used by many oppressive governments in real life: by selectively enforcing the law and denying effective police protection to its opponents, the regime can in essence lease out political violence to the crime gangs and so keep its own hands clean, and the climate of fear this produces in turn makes the citizenry at large support an intrusive police state. The term Anarcho-Tyranny was introduced to describe this phenomenon in the 1990s, but the strategy itself is much older, and has been used by dictators at least since the days of the Caesars.
Japan being perhaps themajor world economic and military superpower in the 2030s, despite many people today predicting that they will be a declining nation by then (though still powerful) due to low birth rates. It works since this setting explicitly has technology that allows wealthy high-tech economies to maintain GDP and population growth entirely without natural sexual reproduction (see: Azania). Probably, the Japanese used their own slightly less extreme version of Azania-like robotics, AI and mass-scale artificial gestation to re-establish their powerhouse status, and this is how they can compete successfully with less advanced China, Russia and Europe after the United States goes down.
A lot of the seemingly gratuitous brutality following the collapse, by the Confederation but also that by other factions, is actually a more or less necessary consequence of the tanked economy and living standards. For example, hanging for theft seems harsh in real life, but that's because the United States is a rich country that can afford lots of expensive prisons. When you struggle just to feed your population on home-grown beans and potatoes, ban coffee to save hard currency for essential imports, and try to keep families with children warm through winters without electricity by burning domestic coal and wood, it begins to sound a lot more understandable that the people won't stand for spending millions of tax dollars on keeping a criminal behind bars for many years.
That's not fridge, that's literal in-universe propaganda explanation given. What's brilliant is completely accidental and unintended by the writer: In real life, prisons are not an expense but a huge money-maker thanks to free forced labor of the prisoners, a.k.a completely legal slavery. Only the slave owner is the state in a roundabout way. That's how they are paying their debt to society, by working jobs others don't want to do for far less than the minimum wage. New Confederacy doesn't need prisons to have roundabout slavery, they actually have direct slavery and the whole country is a prison. Those strict punishments are to keep their slave populations in line as to prevent revolts.
It makes perfect sense that Azania should be Kraft's most hated and feared enemy, that he needs to destroy or die trying even if it is not an immediate threat. His belief is that all forms of leftism, egalitarianism and tyranny in general eventually fail because they run contrary to human nature; regardless of whether that is true or not, the very point of Azania as a social experiment is explicitly to abolish human nature through advanced technology and create a new, "improved" humanity with different characteristics. If they are successful, his paradigm will not apply to them anymore, and they might actually win in the long run.
Early on there's an offhand, amusing incident in which a federal judge is tarred and feathered by a mob, and hurled into Boston Harbor. It even makes the newspapers. Except... they used road tar which should be hundreds of degrees to be liquid, not the softer pine tar of colonial days. That sounds pretty much lethal, especially since they followed it up with dumping the old man in the harbor in the dead of winter.
When Rumford and Kraft speak before the Azanian War, Kraft believes Azanian society will inevitably collapse, but after generations. When Rumford asks why they should be the aggressor instead of waiting generations, Kraft says in the meantime their ideology could spread likening it to the French Revolution. It's hard not to read this as an admission that Victoria cannot allow successful alternatives to reactionary Retroculture to exist. Now combine this doctrine with the end, where Victoria has global reach and a superweapon that stops hostile firearms from working...
Consider the following popular children's song in Victoria, ubiquitous in the Black farming communes. A new generation is being thoroughly indoctrinated into Retroculture.
Also the revived one that's (probably erroneously) connected to the Black Death. That connection certainly isn't erroneous, anymore.
Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down...
For that matter, consider the fate of the children in any of the various dystopian, post-American "enemy" states. In addition to wars, plagues, starvation and everything else, they will all be indoctrinated with one totalitarian ideology or another, from enviro-communism (Cascadia) to the Hitler Jugend (the Landwehr state). Possibly saddest of all in Azania, where all children (approved, at any rate) are cloned, kind of like in Brave New World: they will never have normal families...
What happens to Transgender people in Victoria? The book never really says (unless they just count them as homosexuals), but given how consistently conservative the Retroculturists who are Victoria's dominant cultural force are on all other social issues, it would seem unlikely that they would be very accepting of them.
Race relations in the New Confederacy. First the issue is glanced over with Rumford saying that without ideologues race-baiting and telling people they're oppressed victims, everything is fine and always has been in the South. The races don't mix much, but when they do, they all know their roles and responsibilitiesnote apparently all along the secret to perfect race relations was for everyone with dark skin to just Know Their Place. A couple paragraphs later, he mentions how the Klan stays in the hollows of the countryside. The only black people Rumford meets in his Southern adventure are a kid working at a diner in Atlanta, and his "darkey" driver his first few days. It seems unlikely life is that great for Blacks in a New Confederacy.
And as bad as things are, there is nowhere to leave and there is no way to leave. They are given enough food to barely survive, are not given any education and by the end of the book New Confederacy has global reach, considers everyone who disagrees with them an enemy to be exterminated, has ideological allies with the agreement to send back "dissidents" back to New Confederacy to be executed... At that point, the choice is between stay a slave or die.
The main action of the series takes place in the 2030s and 40s, yet the book is littered with Vietnam War references (including one particularly Take That! where Jane Fonda / Hanoi Jane is killed) and several officers still on active duty refer to Desert Storm as if it were something they had personally participated in.
According to several reviewers it's fairly clear Lindt wrote the original drafts based off a Nineties perspective, and didn't bother to change much afterwards when he revamped it for the 2030s setting.
How is it that even before everything fell apart and people might pursue any form of security, the Christian Marines were able to turn so much of local law enforcement to their advantage while kidnapping, threatening and extorting public officials?
Recent high-profile cases and political correctness indeed gone mad have made some officers worried about being fired/sued/charged for doing their job. Also at this point, those same public officials are the source of a great deal of oppressive, mostly ''ridiculous'' and unnecessary laws. The CM's could offer greatly loosened rules of force along with the removal of oppressively poor leadership.
Early in the story, the Chinese gain rights to build a massive hydroelectric dam in the Bay of Fundy, and a 99 year monopoly on power in the Northern Confederacy/Victoria. This never comes up again, either when Rumford is watching TV in a general store thanks to a (now illegal) diesel generator, or when China is annoyed enough over their giving Cascadia to the Japanese to fire a warning shot with a nuke. So what happened?
Obviously any monopoly doesn't come into force until the dam is actually built in the first place, if it even applies to small private generators at all. As for what happened—presumably they just nationalized the megaproject and finished it on their own when relations with China went sour. It comes online on schedule in the last few chapters.
Atlanta in general. The Confederate legislature moved there and elected their own president, while Yancey called a new legislature and for help from the North to prevent a civil war. While Rumford is reconnoitering Atlanta, he befriends police who say the Black population is about to rise up, overthrow the legislature and declare a commune, and to help this along he tells all the cops to take their families and get out. So, his enemies implode under their own weight, right? He came to stop the New South government in Atalanta only to find the problem taken care of. Nope! Rumford for some reason, finds this victory insufficient if the Old South doesn't mobilize to crush the Commune, and nukes the place to force them into action. Not only does this far exceed his mission parameters, beyond even the likely reaction to solving civil unrest with nukes.
Actually, it seems pretty ironic that in their efforts to escape Federal tyranny, the Victorians have created a state that is commercially and militarily dependent on Russian aid, where China has a monopoly on power, the Japanese own and have developed massive tracts of land, and their governor is the first American leader since 1781 to have sworn fealty to a foreign (and deposed!) king.
Is Victoria actually dependent on Russia for anything after the Civil War? There's no mention of further subsidies or arms imports after that, and they are said to run a net export surplus by the end, as well as their own defense industries. Their main trading partner is Japan. As for Kraft, his loyalty to the Kaiser is a private thing, and doesn't apply to his successor or Victoria as a country.
Where is the Tzar even getting T-34s? By the time the novel starts, the production lines for them have been shut down for at least 80 years. Only a handful of countries even use them and even they only have a handful of them working.
The Russians even in real life have huge stores of surplus everything from World War II onward. As the stereotype goes, they don't ever throw stuff away, they just mothball it somewhere in Siberia. Obviously it's slightly more complicated in real life, but being able to rig up a hundred T-34s in working order is by far one of the least unrealistic things they get to do in this book. (Of course, it would be still more realistic if the tanks were T-55s or the like, as there will be a lot more of those in working order, as well as living instructors available—and besides, they will generally do a better job at just about everything).
