Tom Kratman's new book A Desert Called Peace is more than a novel. It is a forceful and very timely political statement presented as a dystopian science fiction novel, but difficult for anyone to mistake for mere fiction. Working with the support of a sympathetic publisher and under the protective disguise of the science fiction genre, Kratman has written the kind of book that a lot of people would like to see banned or burnt if they could get away with it. It is a book which will make many furious, even more troubled, and some few enlightened.

As he did in A State of Disobedience, Kratman has taken real world events and changed the names to protect the not-so innocent, and presented them as an illustration of his view of what's wrong in the world and how things ought to be. In A Desert Called Peace the writing and the fictional narrative are stronger and the setting deliberately distanced, because the events and themes which the novel addresses are much more immediate and controversial. Nonetheless, anyone with an awareness of recent history and major world figures can easily identify the places, people and events beneath Kratman's veneer of science fiction.

The story is set 500 years in the future on a world called Terra Nova, Earth's single interstellar colony, made accessible by an accidentally discovered wormhole. The novel presents the backstory of the colonization and development of Terra Nova as interludes to the main narrative, providing a fairly reasonable scenario of how the world could develop such a startling similarity to Earth in the beginning of the 21st century. Earth itself also plays a significant secondary role in the story, and will likely play a larger role in the as yet unpublished sequel Carnifex.

Five centuries after settlement, Terra Nova has ended up remarkably like today's Earth, with colonies established by different earth nations developing into analogs of those nations in similar geographical regions. The hemispheres may be flipped, but the relative positions of the nations of the new world match those of the old and despite name changes, the reader will recognize the major players. The Taurans are the Europeans, the Volgans are the Russians, the FSC is the USA, Sumeria is Iraq, Balboa is Panama and so on. Some contemporary figures and many institutions are identifiable as well, and many are certainly represented by type if not as specific individuals. There are international do-gooders and NGOs and media organizations which will ring plenty of bells, and the world faces many of the same problems ours does, including international terrorism in the form of fanatical Salafi muslims settled in an oil-rich region.