Fiume is to build weapons to terrify the world. Secondari shares D’Annunzio’s dream of a Futurist world run by supermen like themselves, men of destiny who will sweep aside the bourgeois who stand in their way of creating “a world fit for heroes”. Most of the story is told from the point of view of Lorenzo Secondari, a former artilleryman and engineer who dreams of the Pirate Utopia manufacturing flying torpedoes (enabled by our old friend Giulio Ulivi of death ray fame). The pirate utopia draws plenty of anarchists and revolutionaries and smugglers and money launderers. Sterling’s pirate utopia is populated by several historical figures and taps into the zeitgeist of pseudoscience, spiritualism, parapsychology, occultism, and rapidly advancing technology that makes the 1920s so interesting. As you would expect from Sterling, he loves the hardware of the Italian armored cars (that would be “a standard Lancia-Ansaldo IZM”) and guns and fashions.Īnd it’s not very successful fiction. This is more of an emotional alternate history than you would get from Howard Waldrop, and it’s just as detailed. And Lovecraft was an admirer of fascism and Mussolini though D’Annunzio’s ideas, specifically his love of Futurism, don’t seem very fascistic. And Lovecraft did have a business relationship with Houdini, but it started in 1923. Yes, Sterling certainly knows his Lovecraft and what an Anglophile he was, and his slangy talk here is certainly something that Lovecraft could do on occasion with his friends. Secret Service, with Harry Houdini as their boss no less. Howard are strangely working with the U.S. The trouble is, it’s not really a very plausible alternate history. And, while it doesn’t really play into the onstage drama, Hitler fatally catches a bullet during a “beer-hall brawl”. The departure from our timeline is the poisoning of Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. Sterling’s book is an alternate history of a sort and a work of “dieselpunk”. In our world, the fun ended on Decemwhen the Italian navy bombarded D’Annunzio’s palace and declared the existence of the Republic of Fiume, an event known in fascist circles as the “Christmas of Blood”. It was a country where music was declared the fundamental principle of the state. To say nothing of the daily poetry readings D’Annunzio gave from a balcony, nightly fireworks, and uniforms that inspired many a European political extremist to come. Thus the pirate utopia of scavenging weapons depots, more traditional piracy, extortion, free love, syndicalism, women’s suffrage, and casual drug use was born. He was angry that the Treaty of Versailles did not acknowledge Italian claims to the city. On September 12, 1919, acclaimed Italian war hero and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio stormed the city of Fiume, in what is now with Croatia, with 2,600 veterans of the Italian Army. Review: Pirate Utopia, Bruce Sterling, 2016. Speculiction ways in with a more detailed review. Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: The Career of a Conceptonly mentions D’Annunzio once. D’Annunzio seems, at least in this story, way too obsessed with a vision of a new world to be a true fascist. My sense is not all that closely apart from the political stagecraft Mussolini picked up from D’Annunzio. Ledeen’s D’Annunzio: The First Duce to see how closely D’Annunzio’s ideas matched Fascism. The Regency of Carnaro is one of those European convulsions in the period between the world wars most Americans, including me, are ignorant of since we tend to think only of the Spanish Civil War in that regard. When I again pick up work on my World War One in Fantastic Fiction series, I’ll look more closely at the novella’s elements related to the war, but most of the story takes place post-war. It was the brainchild of Gabriele D’Annunzio, poet, playwright, fighter pilot, war hero, and inventor, in the Regency, of a lot of the symbols later used by the Italian Fascists. I’d heard of that short-lived “country” before on the Roads to the Great War blog. So, today, we go to the island of Fiume in 1920 and the short-lived Regency of Carnaro, the so-called Pirate Utopia. I’m still working on my review of Brian Stableford’s Scientific Romance (with 1914 being the most recent story in the anthology), but that’s going to take a while to make notes and write up.īy I already know what I’m going to say for some books I’ve finished since then. Purely by accident, I seem to be caught in the 1920s for the next few reviews.
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