A Son of the Revolution
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“A Son of the Revolution,” a short story by Jan Wildt, appeared in the debut issue of the literary/speculative-fiction magazine New Genre in 2000.
“A Son of the Revolution” has two related subplots. The first uses space opera tropes to tell the story of a seven-member crew of telepaths waging psychic war on an unknown enemy. Their interstellar vessel travels through a realm which either lies outside our universe or is somehow a “non-orthogonal” transformation of it. This realm is variously referred to as “no-time,” “der Zwischenphasenraum [German, ‘between-phases-space’],” “the Zelber Zone,” and “the Zoo.” A bewildering series of engagements is described from the standpoint of “the rookie,” the crew’s newest member. Eventually, his impetuous lunge at a seductive, taunting colleague precipitates the catastrophic destruction of the vessel, which only he survives. He is discharged as unsuitable for further service.
The second subplot, told in alternating sections with the first, takes place in America during the Bill Clinton administration and describes the recruitment of Walter Metcalf, a top military-academy graduate, for a classified government project. In crisp, unadorned language which contrasts with that of the disorienting psy-war sequences, it is strongly implied that Metcalf will be fighting in that war, likely as “the rookie” of the first subplot.
In a long and somewhat anticlimactic epilogue, however, the reader learns differently. A Dr. Zelber, an American government scientist in 1919, is seen administering an experimental drug to a comatose young trauma victim who is considered terminal. The drug turns out to be an early and imperfect means of putting a comatose brain into the “no-time” state, where it can engage in the mysterious psy-war (already ongoing in 1919). But Zelber is dismayed to see the subject eventually awaken and recover; the reader is given to understand that the participant’s death is necessary for effective psy-combat.
The last paragraph[s] reveal[s] that it is this patient in 1919, and not Walter Metcalf in the 1990s, who is “the rookie”. Both unexpectedly cheat death, but the revelation is bittersweet. Although the 1919 patient goes on to live a long and healthy life, the unspoken implication is that Metcalf, recruited after 80 years of refinements of the psy-induction technique, does not go home after all, but rather has marched off to certain death.
“A Son of the Revolution” is a difficult read, and in places seems almost deliberately confusing. However, the extreme disorientation of the psy-war sections ably conveys the protagonist’s own confusion on his maiden voyage in no-time. Review site Tangent Online called the story “opaque” but praised the “unique and brutal grace” of its writing, comparing it favorably to similarly-themed works by science-fiction authors Robert A. Heinlein and Joe Haldeman.
