With no knowledge of the historical import, the political pillars of the novella-and I should say clearly that, like most of Sterling’s recent fiction, it is the politics that are primarily of interest here-were much more malleable. Then, maybe join me in a deep dive through Wikipedia to find more cool moments in history.īenjamin Gabriel for STRANGE HORIZONS examines the story.īefore reading PIRATE UTOPIA, I was completely unfamiliar with the history of the Regency of Carnaro (aka Fiume), and there is something to be said about how that affected my enjoyment of Bruce Sterling’s latest Italian adventure. Was there ever a similar free state nestled in the Americas? In Eurasia? In Africa? Things like Cargo Cults in the pacific, the strange results of colliding culture and knowledge…that’s what PIRATE UTOPIA piqued in my mind. It made me want to discover other odd spandrels left by massive leaps and changes in the world. PIRATE UTOPIA is strange fiction about a time and zeitgeist that may be stranger than the fiction itself. What must it have been like, to be on tons of cocaine and working on radio-controlled weapons and casting down the archaic notions of the past, forging on to a future lit by the fires of industry and war? The thought is intoxicating to some of the characters, even more than the intoxicants themselves. They’re almost caricatures, but I don’t think they’d be that far off from the real thing, given the immense shifts in technology and thought taking place in the twenties. The cast have deeply held principles, they’re people of action, deep thinkers, artists, revolutionaries!īut they’re also absurd, in their own way. It’s a book driven not by plot but by character and setting, which have enough going for them to make it a riveting read. Sterling’s writing conjured an amalgam of Miyazaki (particularly because of PORCO ROSSO, which is set in the Adriatic) and THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE, for its surreality and darkness. Because the story of Fiume is so obscure (or, at least was completely unknown to me prior to reading PIRATE UTOPIA ), it reads more like historical fantasy than alternate history, and had me pausing regularly to look up people and places I’d never heard of before. It is a fine work of alternate history focused on a particularly odd time in a little-known city in Europe after the Great War. In their place comes a story about the magic, sea battles, purloined princesses, manhunts, make-believe kingdoms, fraudulent ambassadors, spies, jewel thieves, poisoners and devil worship that lie at the origins of modern freedom.The highly recommended PIRATE UTOPIA is a delightfully odd readįour fresh reviews for Bruce Sterling’s entertaining and thoughtful PIRATE UTOPIA.īruce Sterling’s PIRATE UTOPIA is a delightful and odd read. Pirate Enlightenment playfully dismantles the central myths of the Enlightenment. Its actors were Malagasy women, merchants and traders, philosopher kings and escaped slaves, exploring ideas that were ultimately to be put into practice by Western revolutionary regimes a century later. In this jewel of a book, he offers a way to ‘decolonize the Enlightenment’, demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an alternative vision of human freedom, far from that being formulated in the salons and coffee houses of Europe. This was the Golden Age of Piracy, a period of violent buccaneering and rollicking legends – but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land.įor Graeber, Madagascar’s lost pirate utopia represents some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. ![]() ![]() Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. A brilliant companion volume to the best-selling Dawn of Everything’ Amitav Ghosh ![]() ‘A characteristically radical re-reading of history that places the social and political experiments of pirates at the heart of the European Enlightenment.
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