A bit more than two years ago, I reviewed Robert Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin--a disturbing but powerful novel set in a future where the combination of terrorism, elites embracing Islam, and the disappearance of Christianity as a significant influence on much of the United States, leads to the division of America into the Islamic States of America and the Bible Belt--an impoverished Christian nation occupying roughly the South.
At the time I wrote that review in January of 2006, I expressed my belief that two of Ferrigno's assumptions about what would be required for this nightmarish future were a little implausible. I still would like to think that's the case--but watching what has happened to America in that short period of time makes me a bit less confident that something a little like this couldn't happen.
In the intervening two years, we have seen the following worrisome situations:
1. We have someone running for President (who has a chance of winning) who was raised Muslim, purports to be a convert to Christianity, and whose middle name is "Hussein." He attends a church that is Afrocentric, parrots Islamic hostility to "Zionism," and the day after 9/11, blamed the U.S. for it. Furthermore, Louis Farrakhan, the whacko in charge of Nation of Islam, endorsed Obama--and Obama's response was to deplore Farrakhan's anti-Semitism, but Obama refused to reject the endorsement. This is perilously close to something that might appear in a prequel to Prayers for the Assassin.
2. In Western Europe, freedom of speech is increasingly being vetoed by politicians who are afraid of offending Muslims. In America, public schools are building facilities specifically for Muslim religious rituals--something that would never be done for Christians or Jews--and setting aside classroom time for Muslim prayers--while liberal fascists (the natural allies of Islamofascism) are filing suits to get crosses removed from city and county seals and from publicly owned memorials.
3. The post-9/11 change to FISA that allowed warrantless monitoring of terrorists expired--at least partly because the Democrats weren't willing to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that, after 9/11, complied with government requests to tap suspected terrorist communications. And why? Presumably because the trial lawyers, who own the Democratic Party, see a chance for some really big contingency fees on those lawsuits.
4. The increasingly willingness of news organizations to bend to the will of Islamic extremists, for fear of offending them--in a way that they have never shown with respect to Christians. Even worse--the left's increasing support for Islam as the future.
In light of how rapidly the world is changing into something that makes Prayers for the Assassin's world seem more and more possible, I picked up Sins of the Assassin with a heightened sense of dread. Ferrigno's new novel won't turn out to be the future in a literal sense, but an indication of how much worse the world in which my grandchildren will grow up might be.
Sins of the Assassin is a freestanding novel; if you didn't read Prayers for the Assassin, you can read Sins of the Assassin without a sense of having missed something. There are enough references to the events that the previous novel covered that you shouldn't spend a lot of time scratching your head and saying, "How did that happen?"
On the other hand, if you read the first book, there's a lot of stuff here that will be better explained. You might assume that Ferrigno buys into the anthropogenic global warming claims--but if you have carefully read Prayers for the Assassin, you know that there's a connection between cheap oil and this frightening future for America--and one that explains the ecological problems in Sins for the Assassin.
I suspect that some Christians will read Sins of the Assassin (which largely takes place in the independent nation that is called the Bible Belt) and take offense. If you read Prayers for the Assassin, you will realize that it actually compares pretty favorably to the Islamic States of America--and I think Ferrigno is making a point about the nature of fanaticism. As I observed in my review of the first book:
I find it interesting that Ferrigno paints the centers of Islamic fundamentalism in the new America concentrated in the places most prone to leftist derangement today--places such as Seattle and San Francisco. While Ferrigno is never explicit about it, it is instructive that members of lunatic fringe groups seem to have no problem leaping quite astonishing political chasms--because it is the fanaticism that defines the kooks, more than individual belief systems.You can find fanatics in any religion or political movement--people that use whatever cause they espouse as an excuse for power, control, and the infliction of pain on others. In some cases, such fanatics are sociopaths or marginally psychotic--people like Rev. Jim Jones, John Brown, Stalin, Hitler. Some ideologies or theories are better suited to concentrations and abuse of power than others, of course--hence, our Constitution's separation of powers--between the federal and state governments, and separation of powers within the federal government. Islam's emphasis on the unitary nature of religion and government makes it especially suited to power-mad lunatics. At least since the Enlightenment, Christians have generally recognized the dangers of concentrations of power.
As a novel, Sins of the Assassin works very well indeed. There are people that you grow to care about, and even those that you hate--such as The Old One--have a compelling logic to their cruelty and evil.
As with any novel of this form, Ferrigno paints a future derived from our present that seems a little bit of a leap. The Branch Davidian Waco theme park seems a bit bizarre to me, but only because the very serious questions that have been raised about what happened there have fallen off the popular radar. But who knows? Perhaps a later generation will worry less about government wiretaps of terrorists being conducted for our own safety, and worry more about how and why more than 80 people died at the hands of their own government.
I also don't have as much confidence as Ferrigno that the response to the external threat of Islam would be a decline in differences between Protestants and Catholics, and a decline in racism. Societies that are under external threat become, if anything, increasingly focused on internal unity and orthodoxy. Judaism had considerable toleration for differing perspectives before the destruction of the Second Temple, and quite a bit less afterwards. America in the 1950s might be another good example. While racism has definitely declined in this country over the last 50 years--and quite definitely so in the South--I suspect that the frightening future Ferrigno paints would produce more suspicion and more intolerance, not less.
As with Prayers for the Assassin, this is a book with rough language (about how many seventh graders in California talked when they didn't think adults were listening), a lot of violence, and a bit of sex. It is a harsh and realistic book about a harsh and very ugly future.
I didn't read it entirely in one sitting, unlike Prayers for the Assassin, but it was definitely one of those books that you find yourself saying, "I really don't want to stop reading right now, what's going to happen next?" Utterly unpredictable; clearly written; and with a pretty traditional narrative style.
I have come to despise the cypherpunk style because it drops you into a future that you don't understand, and lets you wallow in your confusion for far too long. Don't get me wrong; Sins of the Assassin isn't the pedestrian style of writing that explains everything. (I'm thinking of one of the "Left Behind" series novels I ran into a while back.) But Ferrigno does recognize that there are merits to an omniscient narrator when describing a world thirty years away, and with some new and startling technologies.
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