Tarnished Utopia begins in an old-fashioned way. Allan Winchester, an American soldier, was captured during the Second World War. In his civilian life, he had been an engineer and a botanist, both of which will become relevant later on. With some comrades, he escapes the prison camp, only to end up hiding in a cellar with a German woman, Cynthia.
As they both are hungry, they are happy to find a plentiful larder of food. It is a strange gelatinous substance, but tasty and filling. After their feast, they both fall asleep, and you can imagine Allan's surprise when he wakes up in tattered clothes, Cynthia still asleep next to him, her clothes in a similar condition. As he examines the room, he finds a ledger, where it's stated that the food they ate was super food, that nourishes the eater for a long time, but puts them to sleep during the digestive process. The amount of food they ate put them under for over a thousand years.
After digging themselves up from the cellar long since buried, they find a world that is very different. Germany, the whole of Europe, and the world are now gone, as the ruling people are the Mongols, as the book puts it. The rule is ruthlessly kept by khans, but the people have also spread out from Earth to the Moon and to other worlds in the Solar System.
After Allan and Cynthia are caught and noticed to be unbranded Nordics, Allan is sentenced to a Moon prison colony, and Cynthia is taken by Prince Lohan, who has his own ideas for the woman. From the prison colony begins Allan's journey towards freedom, which is hastened after he happens to rescue a royal woman from an attack. Slowly, he rises in the ranks of the royal secret service until he can finally enact his major plan, which is to overthrow the asian overlords and make Earth and its people free to live in democracy again.
The premise for the Tarnished Utopia is quite an old-fashioned pulp sci-fi trope. It is old-fashioned even for the book's original publishing date. This kind of a "hero sleeps for a thousand years" story might feel more at home a couple of decades earlier. But, in the end, it just means to turn Winchester into a stranger in a strange land kind of a protagonist who, at the same time, with old-fashioned morals, is a disruptive force against the totalitarian regime of the future. And Cynthia's role is similarly old-fashioned: she ends up being a damsel in distress, whom Alan pines for and who is the main inspiration for him trying to break his newfound shackles. She has no other role beyond being a woman of his own age, who obediently longs for him to come and rescue her.
If you think the story in terms of scientific plausibility, a lot of it is, obviously, rather far-fetched. The way the couple gets to the future and all the alien lifeforms from other planets, and so on. There are some spot-on things, though, like how efficiently the governing body is gathering information on the people. Everyone in the future has a dossier, because everyone is constantly monitored with hidden cameras and microphones, and everything that has been gathered can and will be used against the people.
Winchester's botanical exploits become an important part of the story, as after he joins the secret service, his undercover character is a botanist. This cover allows him to plan his upcoming uprising, while he surprisingly ruthlessly, for a pulp sci-fi protagonist uses his newfound position to prod out different facets of the the termoil boiling under the surface of evey totalitarin goverment. In the end, he uses his access to the overcompassing surveillance networks to separate the grains from the chaffs, when he marks out the people he knows need to be destroyed or otherwise disposed of for a better tomorrow to be possible.
Of course, there's always some kind of ruthlessness in pulp heroes. But usually it's more individualistic, man against man kind of savagery, like how John Carter or Conan swings their swords in any battle to the death. But here, Jameson does something different that makes Tarnished Utopia stand out. Winchester does take on the world, not with muscle, but with his brains and turns the authoritarian machine against itself.
If you can give the somewhat archaic views of Asian people a pass, and I'd think a lot of people would describe the book as problematic, the way it describes the Asians and not get over it, the meat of the story is the dangers of authoritarian government and what it is willing to do against everyone it sees a threat to its absolute power. In this world, the class structure is strict. The rulers are above everyone else, and then there are people with varying degrees of use to the people in power. And the less use you are, the less significant you are in every way. And the more useful you are, the more dangerous to the power you are. It's a system where no one really wins, and no one is really safe or secure.
For the old-fashioned roots, I was fully expecting Allan to come out in the end waving the flag of the long-dead USA, but interestingly enough, that never happened. Sure, he builds the revolution, but after that is done, he leaves the future of the world in the hands of the people of the future. All he wants is to go back to the old USA and plant new roots there with Cynthia.
Tarnished Utopia is an interesting read. On the one hand, it is a seemingly old-school pulp sci-fi story, with an absurd premise and the whole fish out of the water trope. But it is well written and manages to do something not that many similar stories do, as the pulo is just aesthetics, the means to an end to get to the core of the story, which is a warning against authoritarianism.
For the surprising scope the story has, Tarnished Utopia is not a long book. It gets through Winchesters enprisonment, entry to the secret service and the toppling of the government in around 150 pages. And it does it in a well-written and surprisingly entertaining way.
My own copy I got as part of a long-since-dead Save the Sci-fi Kickstarter project, which tried to bring forgotten sci-fi books into e-book format. For everyone else, Amazon seems to have the book available for Kindle. There are no new reprints of it, so finding a paperback might be a harder task.
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