Not long ago I watched a piece of forgettable piece of Hollywood drivel in which the bad guys, a bunch of corporate tycoons and rogue CIA goons, were undermining democracy and killing people with impunity. Sigh. Five years after 9/11, the lefties in La La Land have yet to produce a thriller in which the villains are Islamic terrorists. The United States may be engaged in a war with people who behead their captives on videotape and kill indiscriminately with truck bombs but in the mindset of tinsel town, the biggest threat to the world isn’t al Qaeda or nuclear-armed mullahs, it’s environment-raping businessmen, murderous members of the military and power-hungry Southern Senators reading from the Jerry Falwell playbook.
If you’re tired of the predictable Hollywood formula, then here’s a fresh one for you: Drug Lords and Islamists have united to attack the United States. Narco-terrorists are besieging the country. A government run by namby-pamby liberals is powerless to halt the slide into anarchy. Only a handful of good guys – a group of patriotic officers and computer programmers within the intelligence community – can save the country.
That summarizes the plot of Rosetta 6.2, a self-published novel by James Atticus Bowden, a military futurist and frequent contributor to the Bacon’s Rebellion blog and e-zine. Bowden is a gifted writer. Although the book could have benefited from the advice of a professional book editor – pick up the pacing over here, flesh out the plot over there – Rosetta 6.2 is a compelling read. I found myself reaching eagerly for the paperback volume on my bedside table every evening until I finished it.
Early in Rosetta 6.2, Bowden pulls in the reader with “the mystery of the rose cinquefoil” – an inscrutable insignia that pops up on the Internet. As the novel moves along, it sucks in the reader with the thrust and counter-thrust between the good guys, who are on the run, and the cyber-savvy narco-terrorists determined to destroy them. Bowden does a creditable job with character development, peopling his book with distinct and memorable individuals, many of them Evangelical Christians like himself, and builds an effective sub-plot around Jack, an agnostic NASA computer programmer, and his growing respect for his God-fearing companions.
The plot culminates with the execution of a hair-raising plan to destroy the Narco-terrorists. Bowden creates a fascinating scenario, but I’m not sure that it has the impact on the reader that he intends. Indeed, even as one who not infrequently finds himself on the same side of the political divide as Bowden, I found his solution to the Narco-terrorist threat to be scary – the very kind of potentially totalitarian, civil rights-trampling scheme executed by rogue militarists and fanatical Christians that jangle the nerves of paranoid Hollywood liberals. I wouldn’t be surprised if some lefty script writer one day purloins the Rosetta 6.2 plot and flips it to re-fashion Bowden’s heroes from good guys into deluded and dangerous fanatics!
Bowden has assumed a high profile in the Republican Party politics of Hampton Roads in recent years. Admire him or loathe him, you’ll gain insight into his worldview – and that of his conservative, Evangelical confreres – by reading Rosetta 6.2. You can order the book either through Amazon.com or by visiting his website, http://www.americancivilization.net/.
