Originally written 3/25/18
It's not science fiction, despite the flying cars and genetic engineering; it's not fantasy, despite the miracle child. It's political future history. With philosophical asides.
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I think Ada Palmer does consider this society a utopia; she's in love with it, in any case. I'm not. It makes me so deeply uncomfortable that I had to force myself to finish the book. Why?
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The setting is blurry, as I mentioned earlier, and the only people who care about land are a Hive called Mitsubishi, whose caring is based on ownership and rents. Plants appear once, in a gully everyone refers to as "the flower trench": could there be a more dismissive phrase? We don't hear about any mountains, nor valleys nor plains nor any feature of the landscape except the "trench" and a cave where Bridger hides sometimes. OK, the cave is well-described. I like it. But aside from Bridger in his hidey hole, the only people who are ever said to be outside are these Humanist parents who, we're told in passing, died in a whitewater rafting accident. Bridger animates a toy dog, and also in passing we're told about the pterodactyl and a robotic (I think) ferret-like thing, but otherwise, it's all humans, humans and more humans. People don't even eat animals; the only mention of a person eating flesh is a cannibal!
Why does the future contain only humans living indoors?
Is that actually today's reality?
I'm indoors right now. I've been indoors all day. I, living scarcely two miles from the national forest boundary, have not left the city limits in ten days.
Like I said: discomfort.
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My husband and son have gone to Canada for a ski trip. It's a ten-hour drive and they left comparatively late yesterday, so I'm not surprised they haven't called or texted yet; but there's a small chance something may have happened because my son is only sixteen — not an experienced driver — it's rational, really, that I checked on them with the Where's My iPhone app.
Is it rational, then, to dislike trackers so intensely?
The people in this future don't get upset when someone pings them any more than my husband did. They've had 300 years of peace, and have so conquered illness that the leading cause of death is suicide, and everyone knows this is the trackers' doing. They're glad when emergency services checks on them after detecting an adrenaline surge —
Everyone, that is, except Mycroft, because Mycroft's a criminal. A few other people in this novel are Bad but it's mostly abuse of power; our Mycroft, however, is evading detection. This makes Mycroft the only person with a reason to dislike trackers.
Did you get that? Mycroft is the only person in the world who takes off his tracker. And he's the only person in the world trying to undermine the government.
Everyone else is content to be monitored every second of every day because they always follow the rules.
Maybe they're good kids because they can join any government they want based on philosophy, not location. They don't have to move to Canada when someone like Trump gets elected; they just fill out a form, like I did when I switched to Independent. Maybe they're good kids because they can go anywhere they want whenever they want. But if the governmental system works so well — if switching Hives is more meaningful than switching political parties — why are they teetering on the brink of war?
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Bridger doesn't wear a tracker, but he's a-human: Mycroft says he's God incarnate. Saladin, who also wears none, they call inhuman.
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In this world nothing is wild and no one is free.
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