1989... One of the two superpowers which has dominated the 20th century is on the verge of being torn apart. The old communists regime which has held sway since the Revolution of 1917 is weak and divided. Dissident voices, silent for too long, have been raised against the corrupt and inefficient gangsterism of a morally and financially bankrupt ruling party. A new age of openness and reconstruction is dawning... This is the United Socialist States of America. When Eugene Debs led the Revolution, few expected it to lead to the iron-fisted regime of Chairman Al "Scarface" Capone, a dictatorship that would last into the 1950s. But no tyranny, capitalist or communists, can stop real revolutionaries like Buddy Holy, Howard Hughes, Tom Joad, Eliot Ness, Kurt Vonnegut, andthe Blues Brothers. This is the story of 20th century where America had a revolution... and Russia didn't; where there were Tsars in the Kremlin and Commissars in the White House. Where America invaded Japan and Britain fought the war in Vietnam; where Isaac Asimov was a Russian TV astrologer and Ed Gein was a Hero of Labor. Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne turn history on its head with this novel of "what if...?" -- a must-read for Proletariats world-wide!
In the zany scenario of this alternative history of the 20th century, Russia didn't have a revolution, but the United States did, sparked by Teddy Roosevelt's death in a gun battle between the Rough Riders and striking meatpackers in 1912 Chicago. Soon Chairman Capone and the iron arm of the Federal Bureau of Ideology have remade the party of Eugene Debs in their own image. As the authors laboriously conceive it, the U.S. becomes a sort of simplified Eastern Bloc in which historical and pop-culture figures mingle with the fictional characters. Sometimes the rules of this transformation bend weirdly enough to create a kind of brief, madcap diversion, as when Buddy Holly tells how Howard Hughes and Jack Kerouac barnstormed across the USSA in the Spruce Goose, here a homemade biplane ("`I'll tell you what music was in those days," says Holly, here spared from untimely death, "Mario fucking Lanza singing about agricultural machinery"). Despite such bursts of high spirits, Newman's (Bloody Red Baron) and Byrne's disheveled goose has a hard time getting off the ground, and the cartoonish country it surveys offers little food for thought.
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