The Red Napoleon

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Published in 1929, this classic social-science-fiction novel is a tale of the future in which we are now living: the angry rise of the Third World, supported by communism and desperately resisted by capitalist countries. The story closes in what is now the faintly distant past, 1941, when at the novel’s dramatic climax North America wins a great sea battle in the Caribbean, defeating the world-conquering hordes of the Mongol Karakhan, the Red Napoleon,” which have invaded Canada and penetrated the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Gibbons’s prophetic view includes the beginning of the Second World War with a lightning thrust into Poland, the unification of China, worldwide depression, and the astonishing prediction of the rise of the Third World and the conflict over white supremacy. In a brilliant Afterword to this new edition, John Gardner notes that time has proven Gibbons right, that this is a book to bring above-ground into light”; it is, he states, a landmark that slipped by unnoticed.”