In my post on David J. Williams' The Mirrored Heavens, the first book of his Autumn Rain trilogy, I explored the ways in which the use of the present tense in the narrative supported and expressed the political edginess of that novel's themes. The unrelenting presentism, or nowness, of the narrative, I suggested, reflected not just the nature of the novel's events as experienced by the characters, but also the nature of the characters' world -- which in turn reflects something of the nature of our early 21st-century world and its increasingly rapid pace of life and complex sociopolitical and environmental situations. Specifically, I offered the possibility that one can read The Mirrored Heavens as at least in part a science fictional envisioning of, if not commentary on, the mood of the world as created by the Bush administration in its post-9/11 years. I feel even more certain of this reading after finishing the second book of the trilogy, The Burning Skies.
The Burning Skies, in fact, heightens the presentism and political edginess of the narrative by steering the story further into the centre(s) of power of the 22nd century, where the stakes become measurably higher and the dangers and mysteries more acute. In doing so, the novel reinforces what I take to be a fundamental goal of the trilogy as a whole: to illustrate the consequences and implications of the global sociopolitical and socioeconomic climate post-9/11 and, now, post-George W. Bush. The picture is a tenaciously dystopian one.
What make Williams' future such a bad, undesirable place are certain elements of that climate shifted to logical, plausible outcomes. Thus, The Burning Skies offers an opportunity to delve more deeply into the relationship between narrative form and thematic content in the Autumn Rain trilogy specifically and in SF more generally. To do so, I wish to consider how the novel exhibits SF's potential to function as historical allegory -- here, an allegory of mood, atmosphere, and tone, buttressed by Williams' terse, fierce, restless dialogue.
