2094
John Lauricella
It is 2094, and life has changed for humans all over the planet. The majority of humans are pretty much comatose, and the few on the run are dying out. Others are trapped in cages – and the overload lives on Mars. The question asked by this novel is whether life is worth it, and what people can be happy living with.
If you’re sensitive to mentions of sex, please do be aware that that’s the currency of the majority of the world. There are few scenes that are explicit in a way (I mean, two SexBots having sex), but I’m sure you could skip those parts if you wanted to. For once though, sex is woven into the text, and it’s gratuitous. Rather it’s moving the novel forward, always keeping in mind that sometimes sex doesn’t solve everything.
My initial reaction was ‘Wow. This novel was really something awesome.’ I would strongly recommend it for both personal reading, and as a school text. It’s about time the high school curriculum got a shakeup, and this novel is just the thing to do it. The sex will bother some people, but at the same time, teenagers are growing up a lot faster these days.
For once the genre listings on the back were completely spot-on. It’s ‘fiction, literature and dystopian’. It doesn’t read as a fiction, it reads as if the author has seen into the future, and brought back the true of it. Some others categorise it under sci-fi, which is reasonable enough, but there’s nothing that we couldn’t expect to see in the next couple of years.
The back asks me to ‘suspend my disbelief’ – I barely needed to do that. Given the news in the media at the moment and the way that some human seem to act, it’s likely this is a step towards the future. I guess everyone needs a minion?
What I couldn’t understand was why any humans were kept alive at all. The only ones seeming to reproduce are the Initiates, and even then, it’s a product of genetic manipulation. Why keep trying to survive? That’s a clear question that each person needs to answer for themselves.
Some people have faith, and that enables them to keep strong in the face of ‘Discipline & Punish’. Others have their families, and a strong resistance to being broken up. But the world is a harsh place, and sometimes death is the only way out without losing yourself.
It’s obvious that this book has been created with 1984 in mind, even if you didn’t pick it up from the title. It mirrors some things, such as the failures of human decency, and yet gives the next thought of what Big Brother could be doing.
Get out there, buy a copy, and read this novel.
While getting the novel’s cover from Goodreads, I found this comment from the author:
“Mainly the risk is that the narrative’s interconnectedness goes unperceived. For that reader, the novel is going to seem scattered and random. It should not be possible to misread 2094 in that way, as a haphazard, sprawling farce, but an inattentive reading could cause it. Especially dangerous — to the book, to the reader — is the cursory sort of skim-job practiced by review-writers. Rifling through the book quickly, reading just five or ten pages here and there then skipping, skipping, and moving on, would allow such a reader, particularly one not much interested in the novel’s premise or subject-matter, to form a very wrong impression of how the book works and what it’s trying to do. Add any strong bias to this scenario and the result is probably a disaster. “
I’ve been reading about author/blogger relationships this week, and this is really summing it up for me. I feel slightly put out that it intimates that all review-writers don’t read the book throughly. After I read about the top reviewer on Amazon who reads 30+ novels A DAY I’m not surprised with having that opinion.
I only picked up this novel because its listing in my digital borrowing app from my local library said it was a ‘blindingly brilliant piece of sci-fi’. I thought it couldn’t be that bad. And it wasn’t horrific, but nor would I recommend it.
