The Gladiator is a 2007
Harry Turtledove novel for
young adults. Part of the loose
Crosstime Traffic family of books it is
set in a world in an
alternate
history in which the Soviet Union has won the
Cold War. It tied with
Jo
Walton's
Ha'penny for
the 2008
Prometheus Award.
Plot summary
The Gladiator follows the same concept as the other
Crosstime Traffic novels. A parallel world similar in most
respects to our own has discovered the technology to visit and
trade with other parallels, spreading the notions of
liberty and
capitalism at
the same time.
The plot of
The Gladiator follows the same
formula of the other books in the series
with an imperiled company operative and local protagonists being
used as guides to the parallel.
In The Gladiator it is indeed the
capitalist West that has been consigned to the "dustbin of history" and the world has
been remade in the image of the Soviet Union
. The point of divergance from our was the
decison of the United States to allow the Soviet missles to remain
in Cuba during the Cuban Missile
crisis and the complete withdrawal from Vietnam
in
1968. Thus, communism spread throughout
Latin America and
Southeast Asia giving the Soviet Union an
upper hand in economic and military strength over the United
States. Due to the embargo of the many coutries that were captured
in the Soviet Sphere, the United States went bankrupt and lost its
position as a super power, and most of Europe went communist
afterwords in the 1980's and 90's. A hundred years later, communism
has taken over much of the world and capitalism is very much
dead.
The
protagonists of the novel, Gianfranco
and Annarita, are teenagers in an Italian
People's Republic, satellite to the
interests of the USSR
.
Amidst the grey
Soviet
Brutalist tenements they discover a
strategy game shop that is disseminating
capitalist ideas with the games they sell. The shop is a
front for the Crosstime Traffic trading
monopoly, as the protagonists discover when the shop is closed by
the authorities and one of the clerks, Eduardo, turns to the
protagonists for help.
References
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