Ironclads
This is another of Tchaikovsky’s short stories that I’ve wishlisted on Libby for a while and one day it popped up that it was available! I excitedly got a hold of it and started reading it. Unlike his longer works, Tchaikovsky’s shorter works have been some of my most memorable reads, like Spiderlight.
The premise in this one is that in the maybe-not-so-far-future, corporations have taken over the world and have caused the USA to basically become a corporotacy, and they use the government, most pointedly, the military to further each corporation’s own gains. The focus of the story is on the Scions of the Corp CEOs. Who apparently have developed enough armor such that they can be like the knights of the old, where only the rich sons were allowed to ride into battle fully armored and practically invulnerable against the armaments of the day (Agincourt aside, medeival plate armor was pretty hard to penetrate unless you got the knight on the ground and could just crush or concuss him to death).
So anyhow, the scions are reliving those days with their invulnerable mechs and crushing the armies of various government in the name of furthering the corporations gains. The story begins by following 3 of these governments military soldiers as they are tasked to find a scion who seems to have gone missing or dead in his invulnerable suit. You get a little bit of the famed Tchaikovsky’s world building, but not nearly enough. There’s a little bit of the “Finding Private Ryan” feel to the whole story, and there’s always the usual Tchaikovsky “heroes must fail before they succeed” arc, but ultimately I feel that the story fell a bit short mostly because the premise was weak to begin with. The issue with armor plating at the mech/suit level is mostly the same that the knights of old had. You can make armor that cannot be penetrated, or maybe not even dented, but the FORCE of the blow must still go somewhere. Concussions killed knights almost more often than lucky hits through the visor slits or joint plates. In the modern world, armor isn’t practical mostly because even if the armor isn’t penetrated, you can kill the pilots through concussion.
The second part of the book kind of acknowledges this in the sense that bio engineered weapon, no bigger than a normal human being but much stronger and durable is really the way to go. Suits of armor, outside of personal protective armor, probably isn’t practical mostly because you then need a magic source of power, and if you have that magic source of armor, its probably worth a lot more to you to sell that power than to subjugate the world with it. Subjugated populations just don’t have any money to make you rich. =) And that’s all corporations mostly are concerned with.
I think ultimately this fails because Tchaikovsky’s world building doesn’t address this and its one of the things that will come up once you think for more than 3 seconds about this.
Still an entertaining, and short read, but definitely not one of his better works.