Harry Turtledove Goes ‘Powerless’

Harry Turtledove has been publishing surprising SF since 1979 and, presumably, writing it even longer. In that time he has been labeled the “Master of Alternate History” not least for his 11-novel Southern Victory series that follows an alternate outcome of the American Civil War, and for his 8-novel Worldwar series that considers the future of the Earth after a World War II that pits Allies against Axis against Aliens.

In his new novel Powerless, Turtledove imagines an alternate timeline where the Soviet Union emerged victorious from the Cold War and controls the fragmented affiliate republics that patchwork across the American continent. MLS stands not for Major League Soccer, but for Marx, Lenin, Stalin – the ubiquitous “Holy Trinity” of Communism.

Powerless  ★★ (2/5 stars)
By Harry Turtledove 
CAEZIK SF; 290 pages

Stalinist bureaucracy rules over the sunny, cracked streets of Los Angeles and Soviet regulations mingles with party politics to govern the distribution of scant, poor food to California’s shops. As part of the oppressive order of the West Coast People’s Democratic Republic, even the simplest public display of dissent — a propaganda poster unhung in a grocery — becomes an act of punishable subversion.

Until he throws away that mandatory poster, Charlie Simpkins is an unremarkable grocery manager in the San Fernando Valley. His refusal to hang a propaganda poster is less a bold stand than the moment where he just wearies of the bullshit. Yet, Turtledove shows how this tiny crack in the facade of belief ends up causing Charlie, in his own small way, to become an outright opponent of the hardline MLSers.

Turtledove’s prose captures the banality of totalitarianism: the “gloomy commute,” the constant surveillance, the inescapable drone of state slogans. Charlie’s slow awakening mirrors the experience of ordinary people who learn that to live freely, they must risk everything, even when real change is remote.

Given that we are watching an unprecedented power grab by the American executive branch it feels like a timely move to publish a novel about authoritarianism in the U.S.. Unfortunately, Powerless reads as so anachronistic that I kept looking to check to see if it was a re-issue. I thought maybe it had been written during or maybe before Turtledove’s golden period in the early 90s when he won. among others, the 1990 Homer Award for Short Story, the 1993 John Esten Cooke Award for Southern Fiction for The Guns of the South (Afrikaner neo-Nazis timetravel to help the South during the Civil War), and the 1994 Hugo Award for Novella for Down in the Bottomlands (the Atlantic never washed back into the Mediterranean so the “sea” is a dry, salty “Bottomland” at the heart of Europe).

Though there is plenty of relevance in climate change or, for that matter, in white South Africans destroying American Civil Rights, Powerless lacks pertinence. It is based on Turtledove’s 2018 short story of the same name, inspired in turn by The Power of the Powerless — a sprawling 1978 essay by Czech freedom activist Vaclav Havel. And, with no clear date in the novel, the 1970s seems about the right time frame for Powerless.

That would be fine, except that not only are the family relationships and personal identities oppressively simplistic but the means of political oppression is uninteresting. The weapons, the aims, the targets, and the agents of totalitarianism in Powerless are of a different era – and one that has been already comprehensively explored. There are few cars, few phones (no mobiles), fewer TVs, a state run radio station, and functionally only two newspapers one of which is loosely run by the state, one of which is loosely run by the Party. Viewed from a world of AI, global evangelicalism, and vast nodes of distributed user generated content, the modes and messages of grievance, aspiration, and distraction shown by Powerless fall flat.

Even the “good guys,” evince only a cursory sense of why freedom might be desirable — perhaps better vegetables and being able to vent truthfully to your wife at home. The deep multicultural patchwork of the U.S. West Coast only appears in a token fashion. Blacks and Jews appear in the resistance, Nelson Yang is a local Party boss that Charlie finds sympathetic, and there are a few Hispanic characters of different stripes, but there is no culture, no religion, no sexuality, no gender to complicate and enrich this California. And little feminism. There are a few women with power in the book, but though independent of mind and with a sharp turn of phrase, Lucille, Charlie’s wife, seems to be living as if she’s a 1950s housewife.

Indeed, calling her Lucille seems like a nod to Lucille Ball and that mid-century mode. Turtledove is prolific and expert but, in this case, he’s missed the mark by half a century. Reading Powerless is a bit like watching an episode of I Love Lucy – it’s clearly well crafted and fascinating as a historical artifact but not particularly compelling fare for 2025.