Set in 2020, this has been described as a work of ‘futuristic’ fiction. Most such fiction — Forster’s The Machine Stops, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, L. P. Hartley’s Facial Justice — describes a world radically different from the one familiar to people at the time when it was written. However, in The Eagle’s Throne the fact that Condoleezza Rice is the first black female president of the United States is about all that differentiates Fuentes’ satiric vision of the political world of the future from the actual one today. May it not be that, in setting the date of his story 14 years ahead, he merely wished to avoid the charge that he was pillorying real-life people?
The foundation on which Fuentes has erected his elaborate but sometimes unconvincing plot is that the Mexican President has incensed the United States firstly by hoisting oil prices and secondly by demanding that the superpower should cease to meddle in the affairs of Colombia.
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