Supercenter

by Jason Rizos

RAISED IN A RETAIL SUPERCENTER and tasked with playing war games on the Siege Arena video console, corporate sponsored Buy-All associate G.E. Westinghouse may just be the most well-trained recruit to come out of the Buy-All Virtual Training Corps - but his methodological precision in battle is often criticized as cowardly, if not somewhat apathetic. He lives in a quiet, uppershelf compartment on Aisle 17 with his young sister Nestle, an aspiring painter beholden by her imaginative renderings of outer space. Here, order is maintained by instilling a sense of fear in the resident associates that their capitalistic livelihood depends on victory in a war waged against the ideology of “Schwagism” on the distant planet Pepsicon. Upon discovering a strange blueprint and suspecting there may be more to his universe than meets the eye, G.E. ventures to the abandoned aisles of the Supercenter, where a band of insurgents refuse employment and call themselves the United Associates Cooperative. Led by one of the Supercenter’s only adults, the UAC seeks to undermine the authority of Management and plans to sabotage the minds of Supercenter Associates. As the Supercenter begins to descend into chaos, G.E. suffers from terrifying dreams that compel him to find a way, any way, beyond the walls of Supercenter #1501

278 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 2013

Reviews

[Michael Allen Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly intelligent, dystopian satire that looks at what the final stage of late-stage capitalism really might look like.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent premise and execution. Great satirical look at the future of our corporate-centered society and the end-game of large companies squashing smaller opposition. The suspense builds as the main character learns more about his big-box prison, and we the readers follow with him as he peels back each layer of lies in the story that has been passed down from Buy-All management.

My only complaint is that I would love to see MORE of the world outside the Supercenter, but that's not really a complaint so much as a request for a sequel.

[Charis Emanon · Rating 5 out of 5]

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know: “Supercenter” Jason Rizos
What if the limits of your world were the walls of a retail shopping center, and that was all you had ever known? That is the question asked by Jason Rizos in “Supercenter”. Children are sorted by the Education Department based on aptitude; our hero, G.E., has been recruited to play video games, with his skills regularly tested in the Siege Arena.
Rizos keeps the story moving with witty observations. In his telling, those children without the “Motor Coordinated Potential” to be video game warriors wind up playing games that “involved shelving and stocking, adding and subtracting” (p. 49). The occupants of the Supercenter imagine that new merchandise is generated in shipping trailers on the Merch Dock, “like some sort of magic oven” (p. 25). Children make their homes in store shelves, are monitored by unassociates, and are named after corporations.
Then, one day, G.E. discovers that there is a space beyond the four walls of the Supercenter. What exists on the outside?
As we solve that riddle, Rizos keeps prompting us to think more deeply. “These people don’t want freedom, they just want reassurance they’re happy.” His characters ultimately sense the betrayal of their existence, as they come to understand the layers of manipulations, the machinations that have caused them to live in a virtual world with no higher purpose than shopping.
Is there life beyond commercialism? Is there a larger world beyond the suburbs and our retail shopping centers? Is it really just shop ‘til you drop?
Rizos asks the questions. We get to find the answers.
This book is a well-crafted reminder that the world into which we have been born has not always been as we now see it; there is hope to overthrow the foundations of our current existence. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Rizos’ “Supercenter” ultimately reveals that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

[Carl Alves · Rating 5 out of 5]

The supercenter is a massive all-purpose department store, whose inhabitants live in the store and never see the outside. Some of them have spent their whole lives there, which is pretty depressing to think about. I try to spend as little time in Wal-Mart as humanly possible. G.E., named after the company, and his sister Nestle(seeing a pattern here) are life-long inhabitants of the Supercenter. G.E. is a star in the siege arena, a high tech video game that simulates real life combat. He is under the belief that his people are at war with Schwags, fighting at the planet Pepsicon—until he leaves the Supercenter and finds out otherwise.

I had a hard time getting into Supercenter at first because the story seemed so absurd. The concept of the war was silly. They were supposedly fighting against hippy types who rebelled against commercialism and fighting it out on some foreign planet. The information didn’t jive with other pieces of information in the story. The moment of clarity for me came when I realized that G.E. was an unreliable narrator, because he had been fed misinformation his whole life. In actuality there was a civil war going on in the country, and the Supercenter was being used by the government to breed soldiers and create weaponry. There was a lot of complexity in this story, and it was far more than it initially seemed. The reality of what the government and military were doing to these kids was pretty cruel. The way that they were preparing them for war would lead them to certain death, because a simulated video game can no way prepare someone for the horrors of actual combat. In the end, this was an enjoyable novel that fans of science fiction will enjoy.

Carl Alves - author of Reconquest: Mother Earth

[Jon Raby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent! Characters depth and personality that draw you into their fun and captivating world