a frightening cultural endorsement of the domestic abuse and female oppression so typical of the post-war era. There is nothing funny about physical violence or the incessant direction of micro-aggressions at your partner-in-life, my friend.
On it goes, one reification after another ball-and-chained, until at last, Atlas, holding up the world at the Rockefeller Center, is replaced by the Objectivist Ayn Rand. Let 'em eat bread -- crumbs.
Don D'Ammassa's "Isn't Life Great," is a dark tale that sees America divided by strictly-enforced Red (Patriot) and Blue (Loyalist) neighborhoods, that sounds like Bosnia just before the country's mental breakdown; an invasion of Iran is under way, and a war with China ends with 'Enlightenment.' Near future imaginings.
The women writers aren't much rosier. Janis Ian, the singer-songwriter, of "At Seventeen" fame (a song quite in keeping with the tone of Dystopia) writes a lyrical, sexy nightmare about a woman growing up in the shadow of The Wall, a tracker of immigrants trying to illegally escape over the Wall back to Mexico, in "His Sweat Like Stars on the Rio Grande." We read:
The distant gunfire we'd occasionally hear wasn't from LICE agents defending our borders. It was from LICE agents shooting desperate workers as they tried to climb The Wall and get out.
Welcome to the Hotel California, where you can check in, but never leave.
The pictographically titled "Tao," by N. Lee Wood, is an email exchange between friends, Michelle in cozy, sweet New Zealand and Carrie in America, the latter with cancer in a failed health care system in a failed state: California has seceded, the nation's a War Zone, there's a mass flight toward the Canadian border, all hell has broken out. One day an email comes back, return to sender address unknown. It's like Exceptionalism's bubble popped - and that's it. No more champagne for that designated driver.
In "The Elites," Stephanie Feldman tells the two-pronged tale of a 'intercultural' family breakdown caused by the policies of Trump and Betty DeVos. A husband and wife exchange chat messages, while he is overseas, presumably the Middle East, where he has gone to look after his ill mother, and now the Trump administration won't let him back in to the US. Their child fails 'an opportunity to be successful' at an elite charter school (and aren't they all). To avoid the self-consciousness government eavesdropping brings, they switch to an encrypted app, but the small talk continues, he says: "**We switched apps so the government couldn't see you berating me in the middle of the night?" It's gets ever darker.
In one of the few stories not directly about the horrors of the Trump era, Indian writer Deepak Unnikrishnan's "Birds," is a real gem. It tells the mawkish tale of Indian Anna Varghese, recruited back home, for one job, discovers when she arrives in Abu Dhabi that the job she expected doesn't exist and she will have to make do with another, lesser job being offered. Chagrined and locked in, she signs on as a Taper at construction sites in Abu Dhabi. When workers fall (or jump) from the buildings, she's there, Darjeena-on-the-spot, to glue, sew and masking-tape them back together again, so that they can return to work. No hospitals allowed; the workers cannot leave the site.
Varghese takes notes of the 'final,' thoughts of jumpers and fallers:
When workers fell, severing limbs, the pain was acute, but borne. Yet what truly stung was the loneliness and anxiety of falling that weighed on their minds.
Anyone who has lived in Abu Dhabi (hand up), or read news articles of men falling off Burj Dubai during its construction will understand the not-so-subtle subcontinental humor at work here. Passports confiscated on arrival by employers, it's a truly dystopic lifestyle.
There are other stories that stand out and are worth mentioning. "The Terrific Leader" by Harry Turtledove imagines Trump as a "smart cookie" leader like Kim Jung-un. There is mention of fermented pear juice, kimchi, and it's a frozen place where "teeth chattered like castanets." Hunger is rife, and when one character, Kim, comes across a food trap, "She almost whooped for joy when she found a big, fat rat noosed in a snare, hanged like a leftish deviationist." The Terrific Leader on TV wears a red baseball cap: AMERICA IS GREAT AGAIN!
Ted White's "Burning Down the House" updates Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but there are no exiled riverside book-memorizers who preserve great works by reciting them all day. In White's dystopia, books left behind bear titles like, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers. Burn, baby, burn! And Jane Yolen's "Handmaid's Other Tale" is a six-stanza poem, one of which goes like this:
I am a woman.
To birth a boy
is what I do
for master's joy.
But one day
I will take a knife
and slice it through
my master's life.
This followed by a vow to obtain, by any means necessary, equality with men.
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