Reich TV Revisited
Looking back at an alternate history novel that’s not so alternate anymore
Imagine your 15 minutes of fame in the Thousand Year Reich…
Not going to lie, I know it’s a catchy line, and I congratulated myself on writing it and putting it on the back cover of my novel, Reich TV. I couldn’t find a mainstream publisher for the novel, so I put it out myself, and it did surprisingly well. This was almost 15 years ago, and the Internet was a very different place, but what’s really strange is how ominously close we’re getting to the dystopian world I created.
Okay, some background is necessary. If you’re into science fiction, you’ll have heard of or perhaps read Philip K. Dick’s classic novel, The Man in the High Castle, which was made into a TV series that first got a lot of attention when it premiered and then seemed to fizzle out in 2019. The “Hitler has won!” scenario has long been a tired trope of fiction, though Robert Harris got a bestseller out of it with Fatherland. While I love alternative history, I never wanted to try that, and yet…
What has haunted me for years, which no one else apparently seemed to consider for film or books, was that the Nazis had television. No kidding. And believe me, their broadcasts were as creepy as you’d expect.
For decades, I only managed to see brief clips here and there, scattered across shows about World War Two, until there was a brilliant documentary, Television Under the Swastika, released on DVD, which provided valuable details.
You see, far more interesting to me than any scenario that “Hitler has won!” is all this fascinating history that we still don’t pay attention to that could have given us a very different world.
For another example, consider how often American pundits bring up the Reichstag Fire, but they all seem to forget there was a court trial and international protests over it, and the Nazis backed down when Stalin threatened them over incarcerating some of the trial’s defendants. So these two amazing pieces prompted me to build my own new jigsaw.
And instead of the trope of a victorious fatherland, I created a Nazi Germany that was familiar yet existed in a context of fax machines, pirate signal television, mobile phones (older folks will remember that the early ones worked on radio signals, not with cell towers), the Internet, and early IBM punch card computers. Some of the tech I depicted had long existed but hadn’t reached its full potential yet, while I “nudged” other innovations into my alternate 1930s. And for good measure, I brought in all kinds of talented people who are legends today but who live quite differently in my world, from actor David Niven to writer Christopher Isherwood.
The back cover blurb gives you the broad strokes of the plot: “The Germans had television in the early years of the Hitler regime. Now see what happens when TV changes the history of Nazi Germany and World War Two! The BBC has lured the Marx Brothers away from America to London so they can perform a variety show each week that’s transmitted all the way into Berlin. Their producer is the young, hard-drinking, womanizing Dylan Thomas, who goes from hating foreign politics to being obsessed with stopping the Nazis.
“Meanwhile, on the night of the Reichstag Fire, young English correspondent George Orwell manages to explore the ruins and makes a startling discovery: the burned bodies of five men handcuffed together, one of them a Brown Shirt and another a high-ranking army officer. Orwell has to team up with a roving band of pirate signal broadcasters to expose the truth about the fire-and the secret of a terrifying new weapon in Nazi hands. Espionage, murder, sabotage and betrayal. They’ll all be exposed on Reich TV, culminating in the most sensational trial of the century.”
It’s always rewarding when you find a reviewer who gets it, and one judged the novel “very compelling, and while it does not follow history as it happened, [Pearce] built a strange parallel and peopled it with characters full of nerve and strength. We get a glimpse into some of the more famous people of the times and their part of the process — but do we? The story is written so well I found it difficult to separate fact from fiction.”
Android Dreamer commented, “Pearce writes wonderfully — so well that it is actually quite a surprise this wasn’t published by a more traditional, larger publishing company.”
I’m not simply quoting this second review for ego’s sake, but as a reminder that good quality fiction — especially genre fiction — doesn’t have to come out of the big corporate publishers. More cynical followers of publishing will tell you that the life expectancy of the average book these days is only one year, so you count yourself blessed if your book stays on a shelf. And as an extra aside, the bad news for authors is that while digital will supposedly make your book last forever, that doesn’t mean your publisher busts their ass much to help with marketing. And most have become obstinate in giving you back your rights.
There is nothing wrong with your television set… Just your world
Reich TV has puttered along now for more than a decade and a half, and as I mentioned at the beginning, we have disturbing parallels with the book. The top Nazis — the original Nazis, not the current Nazis in the White House — hated television. They naturally loved the heroic film depictions made of them by Leni Riefenstahl, but live black and white TV showed Goering for the fat, socially awkward slob he was and revealed how Goebbels looked vulpine. They needed manufactured moments, just as today, Trump’s head of Homeland Security Kristi Noem would rather have carefully edited video of herself (recklessly) hoisting a rifle or riding a horse in Argentina than offer substance.
While yes, there are no exact counterparts to the Marx Brothers variety show I dreamed up, it’s uncanny how the most dangerous critics who skewer Trump and other fascists today are late-night comedians rather than journalists and 24-hour network pundits. Instead of Groucho and Harpo, we have Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Jimmy Kimmel.
Part of the problem with writing any hard (ish) science fiction is that unless you are very up on trends in technology and science, you can’t anticipate tomorrow. This is why the original Star Trek can be unintentionally hilarious, with even the Next Generation starting to look creaky. Why so many buttons that need pushing? It’s not that they couldn’t imagine more portable, sensible computers — they just couldn’t imagine typing keys evolving from metal to soft-crunching plastic to keys that are no more than outlines on your Ipad. While “Artificial Intelligence” has loomed like a bogeyman in sci fi movies and novels for literally more than 80 years, few could imagine we’d get Chat GPT and Copilot shoved down our throats by other humans or that our Tech Bros would get to erode our rights while mainstream media cheers them on.
Just as satirists felt stymied for quite some time in the early “you can’t make it up” days of Trump’s first term, so I’d challenge any dystopia novelist in Trump’s second term to anticipate the sheer ludicrousness of “Alligator Alcatraz.” It’s not the Florida gulag, or even Trump’s recent claims that poor job numbers were “fixed,” that defy plausibility, it’s public acquiescence and journalistic deference.
Orwell and Aldous Huxley gave us classic novels that showed how we can lose, but we refuse to heed their warnings. Even when Ray Bradbury gave us Fahrenheit 451 with an ending which shows civilization can figure out how to survive, we don’t pay attention.
Those who want to ban books continue to demonstrate that they don’t bother to read them.
I wrote a novel fifteen years ago about a fascist regime, and because I thought erroneously that I was only in the entertaining business and not the “make you think” business as well, I let my heroes win and have an upbeat ending. I still believe in hopeful endings for novels, but I believe the great innovations waiting for us in dystopian stories is lighting the way to how we fix the problem. Not simply how the heroes escape the Nazis/Zombies/Aliens/Conservatives, but how we get the world back. How we earn it back.
For a novel published in what now feels like another lifetime so long ago, I wrote a short afterword that answered the question: “Just how much of Reich TV is true?” It rolled out which historical details were surprisingly genuine and where I departed from reality to serve the narrative.
“One of the central questions of our time,” I wrote in the afterword, “is to how to reconcile the natural decency and logical pacifism of a Christopher Isherwood with the pragmatic common sense and call for justice of a George Orwell, who would agree with me, I think, on how peaceful demonstrations in the public squares of Tehran or Tripoli can only take a people so far. Non-violence relies on the tactic of shame, but we are, sadly, in a shameless age. Meanwhile, the [Omar] al-Bashirs keep bringing their great boots down on the faces of ordinary people. We need a few new good ideas. Urgently.”
Yes, Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir was still in power when the novel came out, one of those dictators whose reigns seemed to go on forever… Until they didn’t. And in every case, they only ended when their despotic regimes were endangered — not by love, not by peace and understanding and not by happy tunes — but by firm hands gripping the boot and wrestling it away. By people showing their strength in numbers and as a threat. What comes after is not necessarily much of an improvement and must be assessed case by case.
But time and again, change truly asserts itself in genuine, committed participation in the moment. With a raised fist. With a real voice. Not tweets, not Facebook posts, not damn TikTok videos. Not a gesture at a safe distance, but in the streets. An army of souls. An army of the defiant that says, No. No, you do not get to take away more of our health care while you poison our lakes and rivers. No, you do not get to call me a terrorist simply because I join a protest.
Because ultimately, as much as a despotic regime revels in manipulating technology and intimidating media and screwing around with statistics and photos and all the rest, what they fear is still, thankfully, beyond their control: real human beings expressing themselves in a decisive moment. That moment where you are compelled to close your laptop, switch off the TV, run out the door and join. You go from being a witness to a participant.
You may well be arrested, you may well be charged and sentenced, but you will wear a more honorable label than defendant or terrorist: person with a conscience.
