Product Description

"Maybe I'm not a murderer, maybe I'm just a survivor with crappy luck."

All Benjamin Benson ever wanted to be was a writer. Forced to leave college in the midst of an economic depression, Benson joins the Army and is stationed in Iraq. A mediocre soldier at best, he finds himself poised on the border between Iran and Iraq, preparing to invade Iran, when his unit--and every other unit in a thinly spread Army--receives orders to withdraw to Baghdad. Amid mass confusion and uncertainty, Benson finds himself flying back to America,reluctantly participating in a coup d'etat spearheaded by the Perfect Soldiers, seemingly invincible robot warriors commanded by General Prescott, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the architect of the coup and architect of The Perfect Revolution.

Upon returning to the States, Ben finds himself meritorously promoted at a furious pace, but his promotions come with a cost, a deep and deadly moral cost and as he patrols the streets of his devastated country, Benson is forced to confront the truth behind his meteoric rise to power and his complicity in the wholesale slaughter of innocents that is the real aim of The Perfect Revolution.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2270100 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 220 pages

About the Author
Oscar Deadwood lives in Royal Oak, Michigan with his wife and two sons. He served four years in the Navy and was stationed mainly overseas. He has also worked in a gold mine in the Nevada desert and has been a reporter, a mechanic, and a salesman.

His first story was published thirteen years ago, and his work has recently appeared in Silverthought, Dark Moon Rising, Wanderings, and Darkervision. He has written two novels, The Trinity and The Perfect Revolution, both available from Silverthought Press in 2006.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
March 11, 2013
Iraq/Iran border

I want to be a writer. I've always wanted to be a writer. I've sucked at everything else I've attempted in life.

So go ahead and be a writer, you might say. Go ahead and write something.

But that's kind of hard to do when you're shoved into a uniform and given a gun and told to go fight and by the way, if you hear gunshots, duck.

But a journal, I can do this, this I can do, and I might as well. I might as well put this shit down. We've been sitting here for at least a week now, coiled like snakes, waiting for something—anything—to happen.

And it feels good, writing—the only bit of normalcy in a very, very fucked up world.

But if you're reading this, then you know it's fucked up.

And right now, it's real fucked up. I don't even know where we are.

I would guess we're near the al-Fakka border crossing, behind the mounds of dirt the Iraqis piled up around their borders during the 1980s. I can see Iranian soldiers massing just to the east. Sometimes they come so close to us I can see the bones stretching the dark skin of their long and narrow and bearded faces.

We came to Baghdad a few months ago, leaving Fort Stewart for the fifth time in five years for what we thought was just another tour in Iraq, going on patrols, doing the things we weren't trained for and babysitting a bunch of fat reservists. We're Raiders, the 1st Brigade of the 3D Infantry Division, and we're supposed to be the ones that strike first.

We're all tense as we sit here in this city of tents and generators, stuck on twelve-hour shifts of sentry duty, guarding the mess and supply tents from ourselves. We all know or think we know that we're here to attack Iran, or at least to give that impression, and some guys are ready to fight. It's what they're trained to do, and their hearts are pumping in an adrenaline-induced bloodlust. I liken it to high school football; you practice every day, running till you puke, pounding! tackling dummies and learning plays until Friday night when the coach grabs you by the helmet and throws you into the game and you get to hit somebody for real. In the Army, you train and train and do drills, go to the range, and then they throw you into Iraq and you get to shoot and kill for real.

And there's another thing that's let us know some big shit is about to go down—the treatment of the journalists, the people from the newspapers and TV. They got locked up as soon as we set up camp. The commander ordered the MPs to confiscate all cameras and laptops and recording devices from any member of the press that traveled with us. There were, of course, protests from the reporters, so the MPs had to do their confiscating by gunpoint, putting the journalists into the makeshift jail consisting of a small row of tents on the periphery of our camp.

I had never seen anything like that before. The sight of cameras and reporters was a common one in Iraq, and they pretty much had free reign; they could travel anywhere they liked, though they were all but forbidden to talk to the common soldier.

Anyway, a lot of us are former college students who were forced to drop out, as our families could no longer afford to send us to school. This life in the desert is a far cry from my days at Wayne State University in downtown Detroit. I miss the quiet study of the campus library; I dearly miss my literature and political science classes and drinking coffee with my friends.

I enlisted in the Army shortly after dropping out. I couldn't find a job anywhere.

The unemployment rate in Michigan back in 2009 was something like fifteen percent, and my dad was an engineer working for GM. He was forced out with no severance package at all, with a mortgage and a wife and a son in college and a daughter in high school.

The last time I saw a newspaper, the unemployment rate in Michigan was something approaching thirty percent, a little bit higher than the rest of the country.

There was going to be a draft, but that of course became unnecessary as some of the big corporations, companies like General Motors, began falling down like dominoes and scores of people suddenly became unemployed. The military had a huge pool of desperate people available to sign up and put to work for Uncle Sam.

So, I write this. I write this even though we're not allowed to write letters right now, and our email privileges have been suspended, as our location and mission is secret. I just need to write, I guess. It's kind of therapeutic, a way I can sort this madness that's growing inside me, a madness born from sitting in the desert for a week now with nothing to do except clean my weapon and go through chemical warfare drills.

I have to be careful when and what I write, I think—my XO, a fresh-faced, pimply second lieutenant, just gave me a dirty look. He asked me what I was writing, and I said a journal, which is true. He stuck out his hand to take it from me, but our CO called him away. He told me not to write about Army business and walked away.

I'll have to hide my journal somewhere in the miles of rock and sand that never leaves my sight.

Customer Reviews

The perfect End
This is a book that will be very hard to put down. I just dont have the time to critique the book to the N'th degree, but I feel that if you are a reader of speculative fiction you will find a unique experience here not dependant on your personal politics. It is an "end times" sort of work, but don't expect the usual trimmings around that sort of fiction. Oscar manages to carve a path all his own here.

This could very well be our future
Oscar Deadood's "The Perfect Revolution" brings us to the not so distant future, and the battlefronted borders of wartorn Iraq-Iran. I don't want to spoil the stellar plot and storyline, but by my interpretation, the book reads very much in the heart of 80s SF we've come to know and enjoy, ones which have become timeless classics. In this case, my interpretation based the book solely on Military SF and Technothriller. The prose and narrative was refreshing to say the least. If you've ever read a Deadwood short story, you'd know what I mean. But the dark SF he is most often known for is put aside here with some realism: realism in the case of a collapsing economy and having to drop out of college, realism concerning the war in the Middle East, realism concerning the sociological---very little but done nicely---elements, realism with politics in this future/political change, which is the foreword for this story's coup d'etat. These are all real social changes which are happening now or, you better hold on, not too far down the road in real life. Come, let's be honest. In the Bush Administration, these particular times we live in and all, how long until we are in Iran? And with the United States investing billions and billions of dollars into their defense systems and military, are cyborgs for soldiers or robotlike marines not a possible future? Let's take a look at how our economy is now; it is on the verge of collapsing, as was the case with Russia in 1989, and we may have to fill our "own" status quo with super soldiers.

When I read this book I quickly thought of authors such as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, only better. Oscar Deadwood makes it happen in the case of his protagonist, Benson, who happens to be a writer. And he throws in the militant adjunction through speculative fiction which makes this novel shine. Another interesting element is that Oscar Deadwood breathes life into his Benson character and the overall storyline by using entries from a journal (sort of like a day in the life of a writer-turned-soldier without choice) and the perfect soldiers. With everything that's going on in the Middle East, and how this war and insurgency we're in now (ala Vietnam the sequel), I think it's safe to say that we can all envision this. He uses a character from Michigan, someone who whether military or blue-collar can associate with (Sergeant Benson) on a human level. As Benson is there, and transformed throughout the course of the novel, so are we. We are moved by a 220 page novel that is not only a semi-portent, but quite possibly our future if we're not careful. Highly recommended.

Fear the Perfect Soldiers
Benjamin Benson is a sergeant in the US Army of 2013. He is stationed on the border between US controlled Iraq and a still belligerent Iran. He's a grunt, sad sack, an everyman. And "The Perfect Revolution" is his memoir.

Deadwood's first novel is told in a tightly focused voice. Not only do we learn everything through the eyes of Benson, we learn it in journal entry chunks. Our narrator is only a handful of hours ahead of the reader at any point in the narrative. This gives the reader a sense of blindness, of not knowing what lies around every turn, which just makes the whole thing more disorienting.

I've never been in the military, and know precious little about life as a soldier. I like the fact that Deadwood writes from a viewpoint where many of the conventions and much of the jargon of military life are simply taken for granted. He makes no grand attempt to educate the reader about minutia. Much like any diarist, Benson tells us what happens and how he feels about it.

Into this seemingly standard tale of war come the Perfect Soldiers. As described by Deadwood (through Benson) these robotic additions to the Army are part Terminator, part mafia enforcer, and all menace. They are the unaccountable Black Ops troops that we all know the Army has. But by endowing them with extraordinary - and often very creepy - technological abilities, their accompanying sense of danger is multiplied several fold.

Soon enough, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs - General Prescott - brings all his troops, including his Perfect Soldiers, back home and uses them to effect a coup. Benson is dragged into the mechanics of this Perfect Revolution, forced at each turn to commit ever greater atrocities. What's fascinating about this book is how Deadwood shows a person who has a conscience do unconscionable things. We watch the turmoil within Benson and we hope for his redemption; we hope at least that he will seek redemption. Deadwood dares us to hate his "hero", but it's hard to do. I found myself rooting for this tool of destruction, which is an unsettling feeling.

I wish Deadwood had given us more secondary characters for Benson to play off of. He gives us such a vivid look into the internal nature of expanding evil. I would have liked to have seen the external effects more clearly. On the other hand, since this future United States devolves so quickly into an Orwellian nightmare, maybe we learn all we need to know about Benson from his thoughts. His impact on the outside world is little more than the tally of those he has exterminated.

I'll just say one more thing, about the pacing. That sense of driving at night, with no headlights, on a curving road carries through, from the first chapter to the last. I certainly didn't enjoy the scenery; who could? But I enjoyed the journey.