The is a republishing of a 1990 conclusion to Shirley’s cyberpunk series about a near-future fight against a global fascist conspiracy by a plucky band of freedom fighters. I see I rendered only 3 stars for the first in the series, published in the mid-80s. This one gets an extra star because of the timeliness in relation to the recent acceleration of nationalism fueled by racism and the refugee crisis. The hopeless feeling one gets needs the balm of belief that good people will rise up in effective action to make sure the next genocide is deterred.

The book blurb for the first in the series provides an effective introduction:
<i> Tapping anxieties about rising global nationalism, Shirley presents a Goya-esque vision of war-torn western Europe, bombed out and unstable in the early years of the 21st century from a resurgence of Russian militarism and the collapse of NATO. The Second Alliance, a government-sanctioned multinational police force, has rushed in to restore order and revealed itself a nightmarish incarnation of every fascist and fundamentalist power fantasy. The only defense against the Alliance's creeping totalitarianism is the New Resistance, a polyglot pick-up team of rebels ..</i>

Our setting here is primarily Paris, where the chaos of disrupted communications and infrastructure has allowed the Second Alliance (SA) to place a puppet in power as president and erode human liberties under the guise of law-and-order and sophisticated racist propaganda against the hoards of starving refugees that have arrived in the months after the war. We alternate between the evil puppetmasters and the rebels in an escalating set of conflicts, ranging from street protests that get out of hand to broader conflict over the world domination mission and genocidal plans of the SA. So far France, Italy, and Germany have come under control, the UK is crumbling, and the U.S. is on the sideline, reaping profits from armament sales and shrugging off warnings of the true situation as fake-news conspiracy.

<i>Each country thinks it’s developing a new nationalism, but in fact it’s selling its soul to a greater European Fascist state. </i>

Our motley crew of heroes include an old spy, a hacker, a media producer, a pop music star, a manager of an orbital colony, and an oil sheik from the Middle East. That range brings useful skills and resources for their revolt. The bad guys have a lot of high-tech munitions, drones, spying and torture technologies, bioweapons, and AI-managed propaganda and real-time crowd reading. Written shortly the Internet and cell phone connectivity emerged, much of the tech is out of date, but that doesn’t interfere with the story.

A key strategy for the good guys is to help a respected journalist to document and disseminate over world media the machinations and motives of the SA conspiracy. The recruitment of a genetic engineer working with the SA on their plans for a new “Final Solution” makes for an important turning point in the conflict. One of the main characters (the ex-media guy) is a Jew who finds a lot of parallels to the Holocaust, with this one seeming to target all people of color. For the crime of his effort to bring illegal relief to refugees, he is interred in a prison camp in a Paris suburb with thousands of illegal immigrants and protesters under unspeakable conditions. He begins to understand the answer many asked about why the Jews didn’t rise up en masse to rush their Nazi captors.

<i>Hunger became weakness and weakness became passivity. It was hard to think things out, hard to work in unison with others when you couldn’t think. Hard to make a decision and hard to find the strength to carry it out. …
And the degradation, too, the shaving and the uniforms and the cattlelike herding and the random punishments. Techniques that worked on men and women like coring tools on apples. They cut the pith out of you.</i>

This inspires him to proceed with a successful breakout, but only to bring them to grief at facing robot-controlled machine guns. Also different in this era, the military are capable of wiping out the whole prison facility by rapid response:
<i>Then he felt the ground shake. He paused, looked back to see the crystallized-steel Gargantua arching its metal scythes over the horizon: a Jaegernaut, ten stories high, this one, a spoked wheel without its rim, a giant steel swastika, a skyscraper-size Rototiller ripping up anything in its path … </i>

The mechanized terror at the hand of the bad guys here is a bit more horrific but less sci-fi than the reality of Hellfire missile strikes by drone. The idea of a plague engineered to spare the white race I thought was pretty horrific, but also imaginative within track record of books and films that harness the marriage of genetic engineering and eugenic compulsions.

After the Holocaust, humankind said “never again” and says now “it can’t happen here”, yet other genocides have occurred. We can’t help but be wary of the nationalist impulse and means to power over the fate of nonwhite races and alien cultures. This over-the-top tale reminds us of the need to unify diverse sectors to surmount this common threat.

I read on Wiki that Shirley also wrote horror and fantasy tales in addition to sci fi, sang and wrote punk rock, and wrote a lot of film scripts for TV and films. The key role of hackers in this series against a pervasively corrupt corporate/political system puts the tale into the cyberpunk realm (the author thanks William Gibson and Bruce Sterling in his introduction “for research assistance and other kinds of help, some of it difficult to define”). The tale has the same kind of brain-jacks for accessing a virtual network and realities as early Gibson and Stephenson. But I find the series has more the flavor of Cory Doctorow’s precautionary tales of techno-political drama, though less fun in plot thrills and YA heroes. For stars on the pleasure meter, it’s more like 3.5, rounded up.

The book was provided by the publisher through the Netgalley program.

The conclusion to A Song Called Youth trilogy ends with a bang... or rather, a very gruesome whimper. That's not to say it's sad, but after so much dystopian reality so close to what we have now and a rich and nasty strain of ultimate fascism threaded through the text, I feel like we've been living it.

Okay. Maybe I'm overexaggerating a LITTLE. But still, it's chilling to see a truly pan-racist fascism crop up among the religious right, the generally hateful, the fearful, and the power-hungry.

This one ends with freedom fighters and selective germ-warfare, an antidote to the disinformation machine, and the few good men (and women) standing up against the face of evil.

All in all, it's still an epic and sprawling fight against fascism worldwide and on a colony off the planet. Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll punk against the machine, baby. :)

Oh, and there's a very nice cyberpunk Plateau going on here, man. Counterculture for the win! :)

Honestly, tho, I think the most important thing to realize here is that this trilogy is just as timely now as it was back in the mid-eighties when it was first published. In context, I'm actually pretty astonished. Even more astonished than I would be during a re-read of Neuromancer. Some things age better than others, and this one has aged fine.

A fine non-wine cocktail of cocaine and hard-liquor. ;)