Bruce Sterling, Pirate Utopia (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications 2019)
With foreword by Warren Ellis, afterword by Christopher Brown, interview with Bruce Sterling by Rick Klaw, and art and notes on the art by John Coulthart.
I’ve got a very strong, academic interest in Italian Fascism and so wanted to read this piece by critically acclaimed SF writer Bruce Sterling when it was mentioned by the Outlaw Bookseller on YouTube in one of his reviews of SF books.
Bruce Sterling was, with William Gibson, one of the founders and leaders of the cyberpunk movement in SF that erupted in the 1980s following the publication of Gibson’s Neuromancer. He and Gibson also wrote the steampunk novel, The Difference Engine, which imagined a Victorian age in which Babbage’s pioneering computer had been built, and a revolution had broken out placing Lord Byron on the throne. Before these highly influential genre classics he’d written Involution Ocean, which the Outlaw Bookseller Stephen Andrews has described on his YouTube channel as a punk version of Dune. This is about a drug addict trying to get hold of supplies of the drug flare direct from its source – a species of alien whale on a desert planet in which dust has replaced water. Other books include Heavy Weather, about storm chasers in a near future Texas devastated by climate change and where the aquifers have dried up. Another of his 90s SF books described the economy and society of an isolated, deeply religious world collapsing due to instantaneous contact with the rest of the human settled worlds from the perspective of a visitor from another system with a culture very like that of the French troubadours. This could be read as a metaphor for the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union after it liberalised under Gorbachev.
In this novel he presents an alternative history of the proto-Fascist Regency of Carnaro, the island of Fiume, after it was seized from Yugoslavia after the First World War by a small group of Italian soldiers, supported by the syndicalist seamen’s unions under the writer and air ace Gabriele D’Annunzio. Fiume, now Rijeka in Croatia, was majority Italian. A part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Italians expected it to be granted to them in the territorial redistributions following the War. Instead, American president Woodrow Wilson and the victorious powers granted it instead to Yugoslavia. This provoked outrage amongst the Italian people and the invasion of the town by D’Annunzio. It was under D’Annunzio’s rule, described by one historian as a ‘comic opera regime’ that the panoply of Fascism first appeared. This included a corporatist constitution, in which different industries and sectors of the economy were to be run by specific industrial organisations for those industries which included both workers and managers, drafted by the socialist Alceste de Ambris; the right-armed, ‘Roman’ salute, the Fascist anthem ‘Giovenizza’, and speeches from the balcony by the dictator, in this case D’Annunzio. In reality the regime lasted only a year before D’Annunzio and his troops were evicted by the Italian army. Fiume’s regime is described as ‘Futurist’ throughout the book. Marinetti, the Futurists’ leader, is mentioned, but doesn’t appear. D’Annunzio, the regime’s leader and dictator, was a late Romantic and Decadent writer and poet. The Futurists were involved, along with a number of other radical political groups, but the real Fiume wasn’t a Futurist state.
The book follows Fiume’s rise from pirate city state to powerful independent regency through the eyes of Lorenzo Secondari, an engineer and former army lieutenant in the Great War, part of the pirate ‘Strike of Hand’ committee and head of a squad of nine Croat pirates. These roam the Adriatic stealing anything the city state needs and which they can get their hands on. Secondari is in a chaste, revolutionary relationship with Blanka Piffer, the Communist head of a WW I weapons factory. This has been closed down by its owner, but occupied by its factory girls under the leadership of Frau Piffer. The factory then begins producing cheap arms, like single shot pistols, which are then sold to just about anybody and everybody. The factory is then placed under the control of the trade unions, and Secondari goes on to do this to other factories and enterprises closed down after the end of the War. Real control of the factory, however, is held by Piffer, who gives her female staff good pay and conditions, especially for maternity. Although D’Annunzio himself is an ardent womaniser, keeping a harem of five mistresses at the hotel serving as the city’s seat of government, Carnaro is a pioneering feminist regime. Not only do women have the vote, but they are considered the equals of men both civilly and judicially, entering previously male domains including science. Secondari is promoted to the post of ‘Minister of Vengeance Weapons’ for having the factory return to manufacturing torpedoes. He also has schemes for an aerial torpedo guided by radio plans. Plans for such a torpedo have been drawn up by Italian scientists, but never realized. So Secondari and his gang simply steal them. A young Italian scientist, Ulivi, has also produced another weapon, the deadly F-Ray, which he offers to the regime. And this attracts the attention of the Americans following the incapacity of Wilson after a stroke.
Piffer’s husband, a Communist who abandoned her to fight in an uprising in Vienna, is chased out of the Austrian capital where he joins a Freikorps. These are shot down by the Brown Shirts. During the attack, Adolf Hitler is killed taking a shot for the husband, who is arrested by the authorities and flung into prison. Mussolini is shot in the crotch by his first wife and the Futurist dancer and author of the Futurist Manifesto of Lust, Valentine Saint-Point, and his place as editor of the Popolo d’Italia is taken by the cartoonist Yambo. Saint-Point later turns up with the ‘Art Witch’, Luisa Casati, another of D’Annunzio’s mistresses. Casati was a millionaire patron of the arts, who converted to Islam and practitioner of the occult. Wilson’s proposal for the foundation of the League of Nations falls apart after his stroke, and real government is held by the right-wing Texan General House.
The king of Italy’s younger, more handsome brother, who is himself respected for his role fighting in the war, the Duke of Aosta, is installed as the city’s regent. The Americans send over a team of spies. These comprise the magician and escapologist Houdini, and his stage and publicity assistants Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, who in our world were pulp writers who created Conan the Barbarian and the horrors of the Cthulhu mythos respectively. Impressed with the weapons developed by the city state and their treatment of the Communists, the Americans offer them an alliance, which will turn them into a world power.
The novel calls the characters by the nicknames they were given by D’Annunzio, who is himself referred to as ‘the Prophet’, after the name his own followers gave him: il Vate. All the characters are real people, although in reality Secondari was dead by the time the story takes place and the real Regency of Carnaro in decline. The afterword, ‘To the Fiume Station’, a title based no doubt on the classic book about the origins of Communism and the Russian Revolution, To The Finland Station, discusses the story and where it differs from our world’s history of Carnaro. Sterling himself talks about writing the book and some of the issues it raises in his interview with Klaw, as well as the situation of Science Fiction, Fantascienza in Italian, in Italy, how it differs from American SF, as well as the citizens of Rijeka’s own relationship to their history. He also tells of how the ecstatic character of the regime with its rallies and parades made ordinary life difficult for its citizens. And behind the pomp of the Fascism was the stark reality that life for Italians was grimy and difficult. To get a house, your children educated and even a job you had to ingratiate yourself with the local Fascist boss. As for the ending, this follows a classic American work of the time warning about a possible Fascist regime in America, It Can Happen Here.
Artist John Coulthart’s Futurist illustration of Fiume supremo D’Annunzio
The Carnaro regime is described as Futurist in the book, which is illustrated in a mix of Futurist, Russian Constructivist and related avant-garde styles by John Coulthart. Coulthart had previously worked on Savoy’s Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, which also has an extreme right-wing theme. The eponymous Lord Horror is the notorious traitor, William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, who is now a transsexual in a basque. The first novel in the sequence followed him as he went in search of Adolf Hitler, now one of William S. Burrough’s Mugwumps. The book was banned for years for anti-Semitism following a prosecution brought by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to whom Savoy had sent a review copy. Lord Horror is strong, deeply shocking stuff, dealing with the nature of Nazi rule, its racism and especially the persecution of Jews. No similar horrors appear in Sterling’s book, and Coulthart talks about the artistic styles he chose when illustrating it. The Futurist style of the illustrations make the book a quasi-Futurist artefact in itself, except that Sterling has written the story in a conventional prose style rather than that of the Futurists themselves, with their use of differing scripts, onamatopea and ‘words in freedom’, designed to give the text a sense of immediacy and dynamism.
Some parts of the story seem unlikely given the nature of Fascism as it later developed under Mussolini. It was vehemently anti-feminist and anti-socialist. Women were denied the right to vote and were confined to their traditional domestic role. And already in 1919, when the Fascist party was founded, they were fighting and beating up socialists and communists. It seems unlikely, therefore, that women would be granted full equality and the right to enter the same professions as men in the proto-Fascist state of Fiume. Or that a Futurist member of the regime would form a relationship with a communist, who would herself have a leading role in regime’s economy and industrial order. But this did happen. Article 6 of the Charter of Carnaro, Fiume’s constitution declared that ‘All citizens of the state, of both sexes,, are equal and feel themselves equal in the eyes of the law’. Article 12 declared that ‘All the citizens of both sexes have the full right to choose and carry on any profession, art or craft’. And article 16 stated that ‘Citizens are invested with all civil and political rights as soon as they reach the age of twenty. Without distinction of sex they become electors and eligible for all careers’. In 1920 Marinetti, the Futurists’ leader, published a pamphlet, Beyond Communism, in which he hailed the Russian Revolution while condemning its basis in class warfare rather than nationalism, and attacked ‘conservative traditionalism, material egotism, misogyny, the fear of responsibility and plagiarist provincialism’ as well as bureaucracy and barracks. D’Annunzio also dreamed of transforming the Bolshevik thistle into the Italian rose and Mario Carli, the editor of the Fascist review Testa di Ferro (Ironhead) wrote an article, ‘Our Bolshevism’, in which he dreamed of uniting ‘Futurists, Arditi (elite Italian army veterans) Fascists, combatants, etc, and the so-called parties of the avant-garde, official socialists, reformists, syndicalists, republicans’. However, the book goes a bit too far with Hans Piffer joining the Freikorps. No Communist would ever have done this, as the Freikorps were reactionary conservatives intent on smashing the communist and radical socialist regimes which sprang up in the German states in the 1919 Council Revolution.
I really enjoyed this book as a piece of speculative fiction and as a piece of neo-Futurist art. It also piqued my interest in the real history of the Regency of Fiume. Despite the importance of this episode in creating many of the elements of later Fascism, there seems to be very few books actually written about it. Googling it I found any number of scholarly and popular articles, but the only books that came up were in Italian, though there was an English language biography of D’Annunzio. And looking through some of the histories I have of Italian Fascism, the only book I found in English was Michael Ledeen’s The First Duce, published in 1977. I was also interested to read Sterling’s observations on the differences between anglophone, American SF and that of Italy.
This is, in my view, a good fun read, though not as good some of Sterling’s earlier works, and a literary and artistic exploration of what could have happened at this critical juncture of Fascist history. While not, of course, being in any way a Fascist propaganda piece itself.
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