Recently finished
Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories, an anthology edited by John Joseph Adams.
YOU ARE BEING WATCHED.
Your every movement is being tracked, your every word recorded. Your spouse may be an informer, your children may be listening at your door, your best friend may be a member of the secret police. You are alone among thousands, among great crowds of the brainwashed, the well-behaved, the loyal. Productivity has never been higher, the media blares, and the army is ever triumphant. One wrong move, one slip-up, and you may find yourself disappeared -- swallowed up by a monstrous bureaucracy, vanished into a shadowy labyrinth of interrogation chambers, show trials, and secret prisons from which no one ever escapes. Welcome to the world of the dystopia, a world of government and society gone horribly, nightmarishly wrong.
.
.
.
When the government wields its power against its own people, every citizen becomes an enemy of the state.
A nightmarish collection of 33 short stories that posit a not too distant future that's disturbingly not very different from our present world.
All the usual suspects and favorites are here. There's Shirley Jackson's chilling
The Lottery LeGuinn's eerie
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and Harlan Ellison's brilliant
"Repent Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman. But there's also a number of excellent stories from some of the 'newer' authors such as Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow.
My favorites include
Red Card by S.L. Gilbow. It's a story that posits an interesting solution to widespread incivility. What if the government issued (at random) special cards which gave the bearer a single use permit to kill any one person, at any time, for any reason - or even no reason at all - with guaranteed full immunity from prosecution? And along with each of these cards came a government issued
handgun?
Knowing something like that was out there would probably go a long way towards cutting down on road rage incidents, graffiti sprayers, and rude bank tellers.
More disturbing by far is
Sacrament by Matt Williamson. IMO it's the single most disturbing 11 pages found in the entire collection.
Sacrament is a first person narrative by a future U.S. military interrogator operating in one of those secret "places without a name" that have made a mockery of everything the United States once stood for.
I'm not squeamish nor given to histrionics. But I must admit this one story left me feeling sick (as in physically ill) by the time I was finished with it. IMHO Matt Williamson comes very close to capturing the essence of true evil through the words of one of the darkest and most functionally psychotic characters in the history of fiction. No mean feat for a story this short.
For the curious, a few 'milder' excerpts follow.
Readers are Strongly Cautioned
Bones are not organs, under the Protocols. I've got that stuck up on the wall in the locker room, the briefing room, big signs, all caps: BONES ARE NOT ORGANS.
That leaves a lot of running room.
***
Before the pinpoints, before Suspensions, we couldn't keep a guy from passing out. Wake him up with ammonia, it's not the same as keeping him alert. Now we've got pinpoint synthetics that allow sustained equilibrium. No fainting, no grogginess, no euphoria. It isn't quite the same as True Awake; Dr. Ghose calls it a simulacrum. It's better than True, in some ways. Ali's awake sans certain defenses. With catheters and drips, we can preserve that balance - not for hours, but weeks, months. Last week I left a Session, went home, played kickball with my son, dinner with my wife, long night's sleep, woke up, breakfast, walked the dog, read the paper, when I come back in Ali's still going from the night before. With pinpoints we don't have to take the Rests, and there's not the same concern about organic damage.
***
In any interrogation, there are multiple pivot points. The first is when Ali discovers he no longer has the power to end his life. Everything before that moment is pre-interrogation, as far as I'm concerned. That's why in the Chair, we keep him ventilated and catheterized. We decide whether and when you can eat, shit, piss, breathe - and we can keep you here as long as we like. And we can. We can keep these guys alive forever.
***
There are some, I know, who'd assume, just based on my family background, that I must be motivated by a desire for revenge. People will believe what they want. But nothing could be farther from the truth. As soon as I sense that a member of my interrogator corps is motivated by revenge - revenge, or a perverse enjoyment of cruelty - I strike him from my team; he's gone.
It's true - it may be true - that a soldier has to hate his enemy, but we aren't soldiers here, contra the official narrative. Here, strange as it may sound, we have to love our enemy...
There was a time when I would have read a story like this and taken it as pure fantasy. But in the wake of some of what we learned went on (and is likely still going on) during this never-ending (by design) War on Terror, I'm not so sure about just where fantasy leaves off and reality begins these days.
Anyway...it's a great book, even if it may keep you awake a few nights wondering just how far down some of these frightful pathways humanity's future will eventually wander.
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