Author | Harry Turtledove |
---|---|
Cover artist | Scott M. Fischer |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Series | Crosstime Traffic |
Genre | Alternate history |
Publisher | Tor Books |
Publication date | May 2007 |
Media type | Print (Hardback and Paperback) |
ISBN | 076531486X |
OCLC | 84904009 |
813/.54 22 | |
LC Class | PS3570.U76 G56 2007 |
Preceded by | The Disunited States of America |
Followed by | The Valley-Westside War |
The Gladiator is a novel for young adults by American writer Harry Turtledove, [1] published in 2007. Part of the loose Crosstime Traffic family of books, it is set in a world in an alternate history in which the Soviet Union has won the Cold War. It tied with Jo Walton's Ha'penny for the 2008 Prometheus Award. [2]
The Gladiator follows the same concept as the other Crosstime Traffic novels. A parallel world similar in most respects to our own has discovered the technology to visit and trade with other parallels, spreading the notions of liberty and capitalism at the same time.
The plot of The Gladiator follows the same formula of the other books in the series with an imperiled company operative and local protagonists being used as guides to the parallel. In The Gladiator, it is indeed the capitalist West that has been consigned to the "dustbin of history" and the world has been remade in the image of the Soviet Union. The point of divergence from ours was in 1962. U.S. President John F. Kennedy decides to allow the Soviet missiles to remain in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the complete withdrawal from the Vietnam War in 1968. Thus, communism spreads throughout Latin America and Southeast Asia giving the Soviet Union an upper hand in economic and military strength over the United States. Due to the embargo of the many countries that were integrated into the Soviet Sphere, the United States' economy collapses and goes bankrupt and loses its position as a superpower, and most European countries become communist afterward in the 1980s and 1990s, including France and Italy. A hundred years later, communism has taken over nearly every world country (including the United States itself). Capitalism at large has largely been killed off, though small ventures of capitalism had to be kept as a necessary evil. Religion, despite communism's taboo against it, has been relatively untouched in countries such as Italy, where even the staunchest Italian communist was known to attend a Catholic Mass.
The protagonists of the novel, Gianfranco and Annarita, are teenagers in the Italian People's Republic, now a satellite state of the USSR. Amidst the grey Soviet Brutalist tenements, they discover a strategy game shop that is disseminating capitalist ideas with the games they sell. The shop is a front for the Crosstime Traffic trading monopoly, as the protagonists discover when the shop is closed by the authorities and one of the clerks, Eduardo, turns to the protagonists for help.
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology that became the largest faction of the communist movement in the world in the years following the October Revolution. It was the predominant ideology of most socialist governments throughout the 20th century. Developed in Russia by the Bolsheviks, it was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, Soviet satellite states in the Eastern Bloc, and various countries in the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World during the Cold War, as well as the Communist International after Bolshevization.
Post-communism is the period of political and economic transformation or transition in former communist states located in Eastern Europe and parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in which new governments aimed to create free market-oriented capitalist economies. In 1989–1992, communist party governance collapsed in most communist party-governed states. After severe hardships communist parties retained control in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. SFR Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, which plunged the country into a long complex series of wars between ethnic groups and nation-states. Soviet-oriented communist movements collapsed in countries where they were not in control.
State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises. The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies or of public companies in which the state has controlling shares.
Peaceful coexistence was a theory, developed and applied by the Soviet Union at various points during the Cold War in the context of primarily Marxist–Leninist foreign policy and adopted by Soviet-allied socialist states, according to which the Socialist Bloc could peacefully coexist with the capitalist bloc. This was in contrast to the antagonistic contradiction principle that socialism and capitalism could never coexist in peace. The Soviet Union applied it to relations between the western world, particularly NATO countries, and nations of the Warsaw Pact.
The history of communism encompasses a wide variety of ideologies and political movements sharing the core principles of common ownership of wealth, economic enterprise, and property. Most modern forms of communism are grounded at least nominally in Marxism, a theory and method conceived by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels during the 19th century. Marxism subsequently gained a widespread following across much of Europe, and throughout the late 1800s its militant supporters were instrumental in a number of unsuccessful revolutions on that continent. During the same era, there was also a proliferation of communist parties which rejected armed revolution, but embraced the Marxist ideal of collective property and a classless society.
Communist propaganda is the artistic and social promotion of the ideology of communism, communist worldview, communist society, and interests of the communist movement. While it tends to carry a negative connotation in the Western world, the term propaganda broadly refers to any publication or campaign aimed at promoting a cause and is/was used for official purposes by most communist-oriented governments. The term may also refer to political parties' opponents' campaign. Rooted in Marxist thought, the propaganda of communism is viewed by its proponents as the vehicle for spreading their idea of enlightenment of working class people and pulling them away from the propaganda of who they view to be their oppressors, that they claim reinforces exploitation, such as religion or consumerism. Communist propaganda therefore stands in opposition to bourgeois or capitalist propaganda.
Crosstime Traffic is a series of books by Harry Turtledove.
The actions by governments of communist states have been subject to criticism across the political spectrum. Communist party rule has been especially criticized by anti-communists and right-wing critics, but also by other socialists such as anarchists, trotskyists, democratic socialists, libertarian socialists and orthodox Marxists. Ruling communist parties have also been challenged by domestic dissent. According to the critics, rule by communist parties has often led to totalitarianism, political repression, restrictions of human rights, poor economic performance, and cultural and artistic censorship.
Communism is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state.
The Disunited States of America is an alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is a part of the Crosstime Traffic series, and takes place in an alternate world where the U.S. was never able to agree on a constitution and continued to govern under the Articles of Confederation. By the early 1800s, the nation dissolved with each state as a separate country. The states trade with each other, engage in diplomacy, and even go to war with each other. Other states exist which do not in our world, such as Boone.
The Valley-Westside War is a 2008 American young adult alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is the sixth and final book in the Crosstime Traffic series.
In High Places is an alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is a part of the Crosstime Traffic series, and takes place in an alternate world where the Black Death was much more virulent, killing 80 percent of the European population, with the continent subsequently repopulated by Muslims.
Curious Notions is an alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is a part of the Crosstime Traffic series. In Curious Notions, the Central Powers won World War I prior to the United States entering the war. Subsequently, the German Empire invaded and conquered the United States in the 1950s. The story is set 150 years later, in German-occupied San Francisco. The main plot deals with time travelers from our universe establishing an electronics shop in San Francisco, coming under the suspicion of both the German authorities and the Tongs while preventing the Germans from duplicating the time travel technology.
Gunpowder Empire is a 2003 alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is the first part of the Crosstime Traffic series.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was an economic policy of the Soviet Union proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 as a temporary expedient. Lenin characterized the NEP in 1922 as an economic system that would include "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control", while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis".
Socialist economics comprises the economic theories, practices and norms of hypothetical and existing socialist economic systems. A socialist economic system is characterized by social ownership and operation of the means of production that may take the form of autonomous cooperatives or direct public ownership wherein production is carried out directly for use rather than for profit. Socialist systems that utilize markets for allocating capital goods and factors of production among economic units are designated market socialism. When planning is utilized, the economic system is designated as a socialist planned economy. Non-market forms of socialism usually include a system of accounting based on calculation-in-kind to value resources and goods.
Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as socialist internationalism, is the perception of all proletarian revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that capitalism is a world-system and therefore the working classes of all nations must act in concert if they are to replace it with communism.
World communism, also known as global communism or international communism, is a form of communism placing emphasis on an international scope rather than being individual communist states. The long-term goal of world communism is an unlimited worldwide communist society that is classless, moneyless, stateless, and nonviolent, which may be achieved through an intermediate-term goal of either a voluntary association of sovereign states as a global alliance, or a world government as a single worldwide state.
Lotta Comunista or Gruppi Leninisti della Sinistra Comunista is a political party born in Italy that does not recognize parliamentary dynamics for the party's strategy in the current historical period, and thus describes itself as extra-parliamentary. It is a revolutionary and internationalist party founded by Arrigo Cervetto and Lorenzo Parodi in 1965 and inspired by the theory and practice of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
Anti anti-communism is opposition to anti-communism as applied in the Cold War. The term was first coined by Clifford Geertz, an American anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study, who defined it as being applied in "the cold war days" by "those who ... regarded the [Red] Menace as the primary fact of contemporary political life" to "[t]hose of us who strenuously opposed [that] obsession, as we saw it ... with the insinuation – wildly incorrect in the vast majority of cases – that, by the law of the double negative, we had some secret affection for the Soviet Union." Stated more simply by Kristen Ghodsee and Scott Sehon, "the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that you could be 'anti anti-communism' without being in favour of communism."