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He's wearing the SF equivalent of beer goggles. |
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The elderly, once past the point of vocational utility, are shipped to a vast reservation in the West known as Cootsland, where their dying needs will be minimally met.
And then there are the "positive" changes: genetic engineering has progressed to the point of "contouring" the progeny of the elite to be perfect little scions for the ruling class. And roving squads of spies and Conglomerate thugs enforce obedience.
We learn all this in a short prologue, and then are plunged into the action.
Dr. Christine Salter is a good Conglomerate cog, overseeing genetic research. Her lover, Dr. Gabriel Cruz, similarly toes the party line. But then they are both tagged for suspicious behavior, due to a statistical anomaly in the databases. Cruz is abducted by the state and ends up with the Dyscards, while Salter is coerced by the nameless Conglomerate Chairman into unethical actions.
Meanwhile, Salter's little sister, Ximena, or X, has been forced into Dyscard status too, while the Salter's beloved grandparents, Patsy and George, have been shipped off to Cootsland.
But all looks bleakest just before the revolution.
A familiar and schematic novel
It continues to amaze me how a once-dominant but antiquated mode of science fiction—the Galaxy-magazine, narrowly focused, straight-line, what-if extrapolation—lingers on, at least among beginning writers (The Age of Conglomerates is a debut novel) and naïve readers, surviving in its little ecological niche despite the presence of younger, more streamlined, smarter, faster, glossier competitors all around it.
By now, one would imagine that writers and readers alike would see that this mode requires an absurd simplification of the way society, politics and technology work, as well as the way people actually behave. When Pohl and Kornbluth wrote The Space Merchants (1953), at least they had their tongues in their cheeks and aimed for absurdism. But to take this literary modus operandi seriously today is a guarantee of producing a book so unrealistic that it will be an instant antique.
Nevins mixes tropes from Logan's Run (1967), Gattaca (1997) and the X-Men mythos (Dyscards = Morlocks), along with some vest-pocket Orwellian imagery to produce a warning against a straw man. His featureless future actually manages to feel more retro than Cory Doctorow's present in Little Brother (2008). And his characters churn through their separate plot threads within The Age of Conglomerates without any real unity of effect.
Nevins' prose style is the final blow against The Age of Conglomerates. Awkward constructions abound. "The jeans would wind up gracing the legs, calves, thighs, and the better sides of people who had to work in this forsaken place." Well, yes, those are indeed the parts of the body traditionally covered by pants, but was it necessary to name them all? "To the Dyscards belonged the night, or so it was believed and so it was justified." What does that mysterious pronoun refer to, and why does whatever "it" is need to be "justified?"
Nevins' heart is in the right place, but he's wearing the SF equivalent of beer goggles.
The same stale and simplistic speculative mode that afflicted Truancy by Isamu Fukui is on display here. But Fukui was an adolescent when he wrote his book, and presumably Nevins is not.
-Paul
