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A Science Fiction Novel That Stress-Tests Our Political Future

Theodore Judson has written, ‘The Timerman,’ a sequel to his much beloved novel ‘Fitzpatrick’s War’ about the political and technological struggles after the fall of America.

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Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco once said that “[a] novel is a machine for generating interpretations.” While most readers today will expect something straightforward out of a novel, with a plain path of growth and development for the characters resulting in a satisfying conclusion, there are still novelists out there who want the reader to figure things out for themselves.

Frank Herbert may have accidentally done this in the 1960s with Dune, writing what he thought was an obvious warning against a single leader having too much power. When the public largely interpreted his book as endorsing Paul Atreides’ ascension, he wrote Dune: Messiah to clarify his position on the matter. Readers still debate Paul’s morality to this day, even if Herbert wrote four more sequels to affirm his own take.

Herbert died in 1986 and Eco died in 2016. But in 2026 it seems less common for a writer to challenge to his own readers, asking, “What do you think is going on here?” and leaving them to sort it out. Theodore Judson, who wrote Fitzpatrick’s War in 2004, recently released a new sequel called The Timerman. Both books will have readers arguing into the night over Judson’s vision for the future.

Fitzpatrick’s War has a clever conceit; it is fashioned as a memoir by a future hero in the year 2453, annotated by his detractor in 2591. In this chronology, the 21st century was a time of electric storms and EMP blackouts that knocked technology backward into the age of steam. We come to find that these storms weren’t natural: They were the result of satellite weapons launched intentionally to remove the comforts and ease of our time, forcing mankind to spend its energy farming and surviving. Thus occupied, we no longer........

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