The Grasshopper Lies Heavy eBook Chandler Duke
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1966 -- a century after the Confederate States of America won the Civil War -- the Cold War rages.
The Soviets control the west coast. The British have The Colonies. The Confederacy is a powder keg in the middle.
A terrorist attack in dystopian Atlanta lights the fuse.
A Captain in the KKK grows disillusioned with his country. A widow who won’t grieve grows disillusioned with herself. A slave working at a weapons factory reaches his limits. A British invasion of Black Panthers. A Russian spy hides in plain sight. A President cashes in his chips.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy tells the story of an America on the brink- of war, of identity, of starting over.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy eBook Chandler Duke
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The Grasshopper Lies Heavy eBook Chandler Duke Reviews
As expected.
Very good read. It will keep your interest.
I recommend this book.
Not what I expected, little slow
Read after watching The man in the high castle. Good story line that kept my attention, but fair writing style.
I really enjoyed ‘The Grasshopper’. Doesn’t follow the ‘book’ from ‘Man in the High Castle’, but it was a very enjoyable read nevertheless. Highly recommend!
The story was ok, but not nearly as interesting as the story in Man in the High Castle. It's story was derivative of one I read years ago entitled If the South Had Won the Civil War.
Super easy read - kept me interested. Somewhat simplistic but enjoyable.
The fictional “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy†by one "Hawthorne Abendsen," is a plot device in Philip K. Dick's "The Man In The High Castle" that stipulates a different timeline of history than either an Axis victory (Dick), a Confederate victory (this work) or our actual timeline. In that work, the conclusion is a US - UK "Lukewarm War" of economic hegemony after a much less hard-fought WW2. Knowing this, I was eager to see whether that idea had finally been fleshed out here in any way - the Confederate flag on the cover was also an enticing hook. I figured "this could be cool."
Nope.
Nonetheless, I continued hoping that something of a similar magnitude would emerge.
Again, nope. Not even close.
I read this (the version) in just under three hours. Much of that, though, I confess was because at around the fifteenth description of the various characters' self-loathing stream-of-consciousness and inadvertent talking to themselves, I started skimming through those parts, at no loss to the narrative. The protagonist, after a short time, began to conjure in my mind a kind of "Alternate History Confederacy of Dunces." Just how many stupid but happy blunders can really be taken seriously? How many times can somebody hammer themselves mentally and still have the narration be of any interest to the reader? Are these people all self-absorbed, neurotic wretches who have to talk themselves into whatever it is they have to do next? It became difficult to like them, even though I'm pretty sure I was supposed to.
The first indications of trouble were the uncorrected grammatical errors. The correct phrases are "had gone," not "had went", "must have seen," not "must have saw", "had run" instead of "had ran," and so forth. That these mistakes were even made, regardless of how they might be corrected later, is hard to accept - this is 3rd grade stuff.
That aside, there are some misshapen historical aspects going on here that would have benefited greatly from a basket or six of exposition
First, why isn't there a map? We know that somehow, the USSR has control of everything west of the Mississippi River and that east of there, everything north of the Confederacy is now British. Border states? Canada? There's a wall along the British/CSA border, hinted at being something like the OT Korean DMZ, but not much else is revealed. A visual of the current North American political landscape would have really given some substantive foundation to the story.
The rest of the world is barely acknowledged. Mexico, which unarguably would have become a target of an expansionist CSA in the 90-ish years between the end of the Civil War and the "World War," is never mentioned. Is it now part of the Soviet occupation? What about Cuba?
The West is Red! How? Never told. The Russians came south in the early 19th Century and Seward's Folly never happened? That maybe could have been plausible since the North lost, but then we find out that California exists . . . The 1905 Russo-Japanese war turned out differently and Russia became a Pacific power, thus supplanting the Japanese in the "World War?" Who knows? Could be, or maybe something else entirely, but this is never given. It just is. And it just is frustrating to those of us who prefer a thought-out environment.
The AT itself seems to have been basically cut out of whole cloth. Without any corroboration, we are never-quite-told that as a price for helping the CSA become victorious, Britain regained control the Northern states in toto and they reverted to British colonies, as a happy and prosperous "Reformed New England." There is no discussion of how that could happen without some sort of military dominance so extreme as to completely cow a still-belligerent North at the end of hostilities.
Then, the CSA's secret police is the KKK. Now, any student of actual history knows that the Klan was begotten of a defeated South's pushing back against the Reconstruction and the liberation of slaves by the victorious North. A dominant South would never have incubated such an entity. In fact, chattel slavery of a type even more brutal than that which existed prior to 1865 exists in this work's AT; this environment is completely opposite to that which created a subversive organization such as the KKK.
Next, there seems to have been only one World War, yet the USSR and Nazi Germany - both inarguable consequences of the First World War - are glaringly present in the AT's "now" or its immediate past. This war ended in 1956 with the USSR dropping an atomic bomb on Berlin, scoring a victory for the Allies - Britain and the Soviets - and isolating the CSA which had been nominally allied with Nazi Germany although it is never known to what extent the war took place in North America, if at all. Nor does it seem that the CSA suffered much in losing the war outside of a cutoff in trade with the British. No occupation, no reparations (Versailles never happened in this AT so no bad examples to avoid) and so forth.
In the AT, a system wherein state-owned slaves are separated at birth from their parents and raised by The State makes it difficult to believe that anybody who was a figure in OT Civil Rights movement would even have been born because of the generational disruption, but two very prominent OT figures appear anyway. Quelle surprise!
(SPOILER ALERT - jump over if you don't want a hint about the ending) At the end, the Soviets are pushed back to the Pacific by "United American" forces. United by whom, the British? Or did they just suddenly decide to up and waltz away from the old Union after 100 years and let the defeated and pariah CSA take over? Did the United States just flash back into existence? No clue. As well, a certain character’s unmistakable biological event gives a good indication of how long the concluding denouement takes at the end – evidently the Soviets are pushovers, winter’s pretty lame out west and the Rocky Mountains aren’t much of an impediment. The entire western half of the continent is pretty much sown up in less than a year. Nice.
Where did the President go at the end?
The chance meeting of two characters at the conclusion was really unlikely given the plot line right up to that point, prefiguration notwithstanding. It’s like there had to be a happy ending, so a contrived and unexplained one was pushed together when a truly better and more believable one could have been worked without a lot of trouble.
Why is there an American flag on the cover? The United States doesn't exist in this timeline.
I get that it's a "point-of-view" writing style from one principle character. However, that character doesn't ruminate about the past in any expository detail. As well, the style deviates from that into a common omniscient, so it doesn't maintain its integrity sufficiently to excuse the lack of surrounding information, and it all falls a little flat.
So, at least in this work, it’s pretty clear that Mr. Duke is no Hawthorne Abendsen, even if we have no Hawthorne Abendsen against which to compare.
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