Powerless

Charlie, a shopkeeper in the West Coast People's Democratic Republic, has reached the limit of his tolerance for his oppressive government and its constant propaganda and hypocrisy. When he receives a new propaganda poster to put in his shop window, he balls it up and throws it away. A small act of rebellion, but one with increasingly disastrous consequences. The new dystopian novel by alternate-history master Turtledove (since Bombs Away: The Hot War, 2015), expanded from a 2018 novella, is set in a version of our own world in which Communism has spread across the globe, and the old nations have been carved up into various "democratic" countries. Echoing the "Prague Spring" liberalization of Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s (and, rather more recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine), the novel is a portrait of a man trying to retain his individuality and principles in a society that demands conformity. Turtledove's characters are vivid, his fictional worlds are as real as our own, and his stories are thought-provoking and plausible. Powerless is Turtledove at his best.