The Company of the Dead
Author: David J. Kowalski
Publisher: Titan Books
ISBN-10: 0-857-6866-6-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-857-6866-6-4
E-book: 978-0-857-6866-7-1
This massive (751 pages) alternate-history novel is a masterpiece of the genre. It starts with a seemingly minor change in history – the RMS Titanic still strikes an iceberg in 1912 and sinks, but different passengers drown – and shows plausibly how this might lead to a 2012 United States divided by a re-seceded Confederacy based around Texas, with the United States portion occupied by Imperial Japan, and the Confederacy subservient to a non-Nazi but super-powerful Imperial Greater Germany (there is a detailed, three-page map); and all on the verge of a thermonuclear holocaust that would destroy all life on Earth.
What if the 1912 sinking of the Titanic were not entirely an accident? “‘The death of all those men [Astor, Guggenheim, Rothschild, Thayer, Widener, President Taft’s representative Major Archibald Butt, others] created a powerful vacuum in turn-of-the-century America. A vacuum that could be exploited by someone privy to the knowledge contained in this journal. The author of this text had enough information at his fingertips to engineer any number of events. He also clearly documented his intention to intervene on the ship. We don’t know the details of what happened on the night of the sinking. We don’t know how he figures into what happened at Sarajevo, or the years that followed. We just know where it starts.’” (p. 150).
In this alternate 2012, the world is at the brink of an apocalyptic war with both sides possessing nuclear weapons. Both Germany and Japan are maneuvering to increase their spheres of influence in North America, while agents of the U.S. and the Confederacy each plot to throw out their controllers and reunite the old U.S., but led by their government. But this is a minor sideshow compared to the border conflicts in Asia that are leading to the impending war. A team of Confederate secret agents led by Joseph Kennedy (our John F. Kennedy’s grand-nephew), despondent at the feeling of futility over whether the South succeeds or not, comes upon this journal from the safe of the sunken Titanic which contains accurate notes on the future, which could not have been written in 1912 – unless the author were a time-traveler.
Hidden within larger conspiracies to reunite the old United States under Confederate dominance, and between German and Japanese global hegemony, Major Joseph Kennedy of the Confederate Bureau of Investigation and his tiny group of agents, aided at first unwillingly by Captain J. J. Lightholler of a ceremonially rebuilt Titanic, work to rediscover the secret of time travel and – no matter what the goal of the original time-traveler was – change history again to prevent the destruction of all life on Earth. But Kennedy is betrayed by his superior within the CBI who, discovering that Kennedy is working toward a goal of his own, assumes that Kennedy’s team has sold out to either the Germans or the Japanese, and maneuvers to have Kennedy’s rogue CBI team annihilated by either the Confederate or Union or Japanese or German secret services, or by American criminal gangs or the Japanese yakuza – whoever can be misled into believing that Kennedy is working against them. As the final nuclear war between Japan and Germany begins, and both world powers openly fight to increase their dominance over a battle-torn North America, Kennedy and his barely half-dozen men desperately race from one side of America to the other to avoid being captured or killed by any of their powerfully deadly enemies, and complete their mission: to go back to 1912, board the Titanic, and – what!?
Company of the Dead is an awesomely complex thriller. Its picture of a 2012 totally unlike ours is awesome in scope and detail, as are Kowalski’s speculations on how this might come about. Kennedy’s mission to (re)change history and save the world – even if he does not know what it will lead to – despite opposition from seemingly every government’s secret assassins, is awesomely desperate. This alternate 2012’s rush to thermonuclear destruction seems awesomely unstoppable.
And this first novel has some awesome problems. It is much too long. Even though it is excellently written (it begins with Kennedy in a seemingly hopeless situation, and impossibly grows ever more hopeless), Kennedy and his men’s constant hairbreadth escapes ultimately numb the reader, who wonders if there will ever be an end to them. It is overly macho. Even though the world of espionage is overwhelmingly masculine, especially in this other 2012’s male-dominated society, the constant intrigue of male political and military leaders, domestic and foreign secret agents, and police and gangsters becomes too one-sided. When a major female character does enter the story – Patricia Malcolm of the CBI – it is not until page 95, and then it is as another secret agent, one of the team, more as another buddy than as a relief from all the masculinity.
But despite these flaws, The Company of the Dead remains an alternate-history novel, and a politico-military thriller, that no fan of those genres dare to miss. First published in Australia, it has already won that country’s 2007 Aurealis Award for the Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year.
