Ironclads is set in the near future. There’s a lot in the geopolitics and social elements of the book that is a direct, albeit very negative extrapolation from the way things are now. The technology, though, goes to some odd places, and I was conscious of not just pushing the envelope but ripping through it a few times. I like my science fiction, after all, and some of what Ted Regan and his squad face up against has more fiction than science to it.
“Designed for deep insertion.”
Most of Ted’s own kit, and that of his squadmates Sturgeon and Franken, is not much different to a modern military payload, but then the chief lesson Ted’s learnt about the army is that they get yesterday’s gear compared to the corporate soldiers. Hence their vehicle, the abysmally named ‘Trojan’, is not so far off a modern armoured car – resilient and rugged but, as the Englishman, Lawes, says, “what soldiers get into just before they get ****ed”. Most of the rest of their kit is drawn direct from cutting edge current tech. Their robotic pack-mule is a six-legged version of the “Big Dog” robots currently being developed, and the translation software in Ted’s helmet isn’t much beyond what advanced phone apps these days are being designed to do.
Cormoran’s toolkit
Cormoran and Lawes are two unwelcome additions to Regan’s team – unwelcome because he knows they’ve got their own agendas and he can’t trust them. Lawes is a shabby little Englishman whose personal kit includes a stealth suit designed to erase his heat signature and fool motion detectors, and this probably isn’t too far off today’s tech (especially as he can’t wear it for long without boiling to death, because his kit is decidedly substandard, too). Cormoran is a different deal: she’s a drone specialist, and that, of course, is very much today’s battlefield běte noire. Cormoran is corporate equipped and trained, though, which means she has cerebral implants that let her run her pets by direct mind control – which isn’t as SF as you’d think given the leaps cyberneticists are making with brain-machine interfaces.
Ruud Mechanicals
One of their perennial opponents in the book, however, goes a bit beyond all that. The Dutch-made Ruud robots may well be what today’s military scientists are working on right now, though. They can work under direct control or they can be given a wide-ranging autonomy, linked one to the other in a network and set to make any given area as unpleasant to the enemy as possible. And, like that other leave-behind weapon, the landmine, areas infested with autonomous robot guardians are going to be a problem that will outlive the war they’re deployed in. So far, so plausible, though I’ll confess making the Ruuds into miniature War of the Worlds tripods was prompted entirely by my own twisted sense of aesthetics. Another piece of craziness that probably isn’t all that crazy is the Russian-made Jodorowsky aircraft, the heaviest military flying machine that ever lumbered into the sky, inspired by the Mil Mi-26, a colossal load-lifting helicopter that actually featured in a legal case a colleague of mine worked on.
The Sons of the Boardroom Elite
Now we move onto some of the core tech of the book, but also some of the more SF-y. The Scions are the wealthy going to war. Ted’s intellectual subordinate Sturgeon kicks off the book comparing them to knights in full armour in the Middle Ages, able to wade through a sea of poorly-equipped peasants, and only facing a comfortable ransom if they fell into enemy hands. In the world of Ironclads the corporate masters of the world (on both sides of the war) aren’t seen dead without their suit of powered armour, fitted with all mod cons and comforts and practically invulnerable to any weapon that Ted or his opposite numbers might be able to deploy. Sturgeon makes the point that it’s not that those weapons don’t exist, it’s that Scions on all sides have an understanding that, just like the knights of old, they don’t get killed.
And then there’s the Finns
I never did get to read a slice of Ironclads when I was in Helsinki for Worldcon. I’m not sure how the Finns would have taken it, but hopefully they’d have appreciated the weird role their compatriots play in the story. In this world, Finland became a haven for bioengineering research outlawed in most of the rest of the world, a place where black labs and rogue scientists fled when the persecution ramped up elsewhere. Which means that, when the US invades Sweden, the Finns take a keen interest and start sending some of their… things over the border to test them out against the American troops. Most immediately evident are their fly-screens that block satellite viewing and foul engines. The Finns have a whole load of worse horrors to dump on the war zone, though, and Ted Regan is going to get to meet them face to face before he can reach his mission objective.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series, from the first volume, Empire In Black and Gold in 2008 to the final book, Seal of the Worm, in 2014, with a new series and a standalone science fiction novel scheduled for 2015. He has been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award and a British Fantasy Society Award. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist.
