What do you think?
Rate this book
Bunker #1
Thank You For Your Cooperation
Welcome to the Bunker, an orderly, underground utopia where everyone's needs have been satisfied.
As far back as he can remember, Terry Renfield has been digging up uranium ore in the mines and getting into the occasional drunken brawl. Until one daystretch on the Loyalty Stretch, he and the rest of the Bunker see someone who looks eerily like himself commit a heinous act of treason. Terry is fired on the spot.
He turns to his girlfriend, Sally Xinhua, for help. Detained and then unexpectedly set free, Terry comes to realize that his misfortunes are no accident. His tiny, insular world shattered forever, he is determined not to be anyone's unwitting pawn – least of all his own.
Sally pulls him into the orbit of more privileged citizens with security clearances – including Van Johnson, the host of Ten Things I Hate About Treason, and Felix Tubman, the head of Homeland Security. What follows is an unlikely adventure spanning the Bunker, the reaches of space, and the forbidding outside.
Now the focus of a grand conspiracy to take down Control, the principal guiding force in the Bunker, Terry is ultimately faced with an identity crisis of epic proportions. Who is the real Terry Renfield? And what is it to actually be a specific person anyway?
As far back as he can remember, Terry Renfield has been digging up uranium ore in the mines and getting into the occasional drunken brawl. Until one daystretch on the Loyalty Stretch, he and the rest of the Bunker see someone who looks eerily like himself commit a heinous act of treason. Terry is fired on the spot.
He turns to his girlfriend, Sally Xinhua, for help. Detained and then unexpectedly set free, Terry comes to realize that his misfortunes are no accident. His tiny, insular world shattered forever, he is determined not to be anyone's unwitting pawn – least of all his own.
Sally pulls him into the orbit of more privileged citizens with security clearances – including Van Johnson, the host of Ten Things I Hate About Treason, and Felix Tubman, the head of Homeland Security. What follows is an unlikely adventure spanning the Bunker, the reaches of space, and the forbidding outside.
Now the focus of a grand conspiracy to take down Control, the principal guiding force in the Bunker, Terry is ultimately faced with an identity crisis of epic proportions. Who is the real Terry Renfield? And what is it to actually be a specific person anyway?
ebook
First published November 15, 2011
3 people are currently reading
375 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 17, 2020
so when does this book get an even bigger publisher than lulu?
Will it be a mixture of Billion Dollar Brain, The Omega Man, and Brave New World in one?
Will it be a mixture of Billion Dollar Brain, The Omega Man, and Brave New World in one?
June 27, 2025
Have you ever read a book that made you excited for what the future holds? Did it make you marvel at all of the wondrous things that could be made reality by the force of imagination and the human spirit? Did it make you wish the future would just hurry the hell up and get here already so you could experience the magic yourself?
Well, Thank You for Your Cooperation isn’t that book.
Welcome to The Bunker. It’s paradise on Earth—or rather Mars, but who’s counting? It’s a utopia, after all. Control keeps it that way, distributing resources, rooting out traitors and social deviants, and making sure that every citizen’s life is safe, equitable, and hygienic. Control selects your profession, assigns living quarters, and manages every facet of the bunker—from shooting down terrorist-launched nuclear warheads, to making the trains run on time. And if the trains don’t run on time, citizen, please check the train schedule again. There must have been a schedule change you were unaware of, because Control is never wrong, and to question Control is an act of treason. You aren’t a traitor, are you?
So work hard, citizen, knowing that you are contributing to the greatest civilization mankind has ever known. Eat your government-approved slop, sleep in your government-approved bunk, and watch your government-approved programming like “Ten Things I Hate about Treason Hosted by Van Johnson.” And always, always be on the lookout for treasonous activity. Traitors are everywhere, and as a responsible citizen it is your duty to report traitors wherever they are found. Failure to report treason is considered treason, and treason of all forms is punishable by immediate termination. After all, your safety is of the utmost importance.
The narrator that guides us through this mucked up (yet hilariously funny) future reality is Terry Renfield. He runs a crew of rock breakers in one of the lower-level quarries of Q-sector mining for… well, we’re really never told. I don’t think Terry even knows. Suffice to say that he pounds rocks all day because that’s what he’s been told his job is. Things suddenly turn upside down when one of the ever-present video screens shows a bit of special breaking news about “terrorist activity” featuring footage of a man who looks exactly like Terry running from some government facility as the place explodes in spectacular fashion. His supervisor suggests that he “take some time off” and then gives him a package and asks him to deliver it to one of the other sectors. Terry is immediately suspicious. You don’t get to be thirty-something years old in the Bunker by blindly doing anything anyone tells you—especially when you’ve never before been asked to do anything similar and you’ve just seen your face on an episode of “Ten Things I Hate about Treason Hosted by Van Johnson.”
But his supervisor has a Delta clearance, which means Terry has to do what he says. So he and his girlfriend Sally (she insists upon coming along) head off to deliver the package, which sets in motion a series of misadventures that take Terry from Homeland Security holding cells, to a space ship, to planet Earth, to an asteroid communications installation, and back into a holding cell once again. Along the way scores of “traitors” meet their deserved demise, and Terry learns a few things, such as:
-His girlfriend is a member of The Underground, an organization of misfits, social deviants, and traitors dedicated to resisting Control’s… control.
-Control is actually a computer and the Alphas (those citizens with alpha clearance) are programmers that program said computer and are all constantly fighting and trying to betray each other to curry favor with Control and/or scoop up more power for themselves.
-Earth is in fact healing from the global catastrophe and is populated by more privileged members of society. The truth is held back from the lower classes “for their own protection.”
-Terry Renfield isn’t Terry Renfield. He’s actually the clone of Terry Renfield that was created for use in a plot to take down Control, but the real Terry switched places with the clone at the last minute.
And so Terry (or Clone Terry) goes along with the little band of conspirators for lack of a better option. I mean, what is he going to do? Turn them in and try explaining to Control why he was keeping company with known terrorists? It’s a good thing he doesn’t, because we wouldn’t have nearly the amount of satirical fun otherwise. Adam Wasserman (He’s the author. Did I forget to mention that?) has a biting wit tailor made for a black comedy like Thank You for Your Cooperation. We’re treated to satirical scenes and commentary related to bureaucracy, Homeland Security, television, child-rearing, environmentalism, politics, and socialized… anything. In doing so, he borrows from a lot of other classic dystopian works such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and Soylent Green (to name a few) and combines them with some of his own ideas to craft a rich and darkly hilarious world.
Part of what makes the satire so funny is the fact that much of the world in Thank You for Your Cooperation isn’t that different from our own. We’ve all bitched and complained about some of the same things. How many times have you spent an hour in line at the DMV only to be told, when you finally get to the front, that the line you want is at the other end of the office and you’ll need to go through that one, too? Who hasn’t, upon going through security at the airport, wondered what kind of pervert decided that having naked pictures taken of you should be a mandatory step in domestic travel? Except in Thank You for Your Cooperation, it’s all been puffed up and hyper-realized into a distortion of reality. It makes it easier to laugh at the sneering fourth grader ground into chunks by a mining drone, or the TV star dying of radiation poisoning, or any number of the hundreds of people that bite the dust due to government oversight and political backbiting. Of course, it helps that it’s a book and it’s not real, but it doesn’t change the fact that the satire is, in the words of my favorite English professor, “well taken.” Dystopia is mostly a serious genre, and these days it seems like there’s no shortage of dystopian books coming out with tales about hardship, loss, “the endurance of the human spirit,” and other bullshit buzz phrases. Wasserman’s facetious treatment of the genre reminded me of the Escape from New York franchise, which is something sorely needed to balance out the “serious books are serious” vibe.
What’s the bad part, you might ask? Well there’s not much, I can tell you that. The structure of the story is a little here and there at one point, jumping forward to another scene, and then backtracking to explain how they all got there. And sometimes there are important details that come out of nowhere, such as the revelation that Terry is a hacker about 3/4 of the way into the book. Wasserman treats it rather flippantly, with a, “You didn’t know that? Oh well!” sort of attitude. It fits with the overall tone of the book, though, so it’s forgivable. It still doesn’t explain why, if Terry is such a good hacker, he didn’t know at least some of the shit about Mars and Earth and Control before the events of the story, but never you mind that. Worrying about those kinds of trivialities is how traitors are born, and you don’t want to be a traitor, do you? And besides, little things like that are what gives the book its Hitchhiker’s-Guide-to-the-Galaxy-crushed-under-a-government-issued-boot feel, so I was able to ignore it for enjoyment’s sake.
Overall, I give Thank You for Your Cooperation four out of five stars.
Well, Thank You for Your Cooperation isn’t that book.
Welcome to The Bunker. It’s paradise on Earth—or rather Mars, but who’s counting? It’s a utopia, after all. Control keeps it that way, distributing resources, rooting out traitors and social deviants, and making sure that every citizen’s life is safe, equitable, and hygienic. Control selects your profession, assigns living quarters, and manages every facet of the bunker—from shooting down terrorist-launched nuclear warheads, to making the trains run on time. And if the trains don’t run on time, citizen, please check the train schedule again. There must have been a schedule change you were unaware of, because Control is never wrong, and to question Control is an act of treason. You aren’t a traitor, are you?
So work hard, citizen, knowing that you are contributing to the greatest civilization mankind has ever known. Eat your government-approved slop, sleep in your government-approved bunk, and watch your government-approved programming like “Ten Things I Hate about Treason Hosted by Van Johnson.” And always, always be on the lookout for treasonous activity. Traitors are everywhere, and as a responsible citizen it is your duty to report traitors wherever they are found. Failure to report treason is considered treason, and treason of all forms is punishable by immediate termination. After all, your safety is of the utmost importance.
The narrator that guides us through this mucked up (yet hilariously funny) future reality is Terry Renfield. He runs a crew of rock breakers in one of the lower-level quarries of Q-sector mining for… well, we’re really never told. I don’t think Terry even knows. Suffice to say that he pounds rocks all day because that’s what he’s been told his job is. Things suddenly turn upside down when one of the ever-present video screens shows a bit of special breaking news about “terrorist activity” featuring footage of a man who looks exactly like Terry running from some government facility as the place explodes in spectacular fashion. His supervisor suggests that he “take some time off” and then gives him a package and asks him to deliver it to one of the other sectors. Terry is immediately suspicious. You don’t get to be thirty-something years old in the Bunker by blindly doing anything anyone tells you—especially when you’ve never before been asked to do anything similar and you’ve just seen your face on an episode of “Ten Things I Hate about Treason Hosted by Van Johnson.”
But his supervisor has a Delta clearance, which means Terry has to do what he says. So he and his girlfriend Sally (she insists upon coming along) head off to deliver the package, which sets in motion a series of misadventures that take Terry from Homeland Security holding cells, to a space ship, to planet Earth, to an asteroid communications installation, and back into a holding cell once again. Along the way scores of “traitors” meet their deserved demise, and Terry learns a few things, such as:
-His girlfriend is a member of The Underground, an organization of misfits, social deviants, and traitors dedicated to resisting Control’s… control.
-Control is actually a computer and the Alphas (those citizens with alpha clearance) are programmers that program said computer and are all constantly fighting and trying to betray each other to curry favor with Control and/or scoop up more power for themselves.
-Earth is in fact healing from the global catastrophe and is populated by more privileged members of society. The truth is held back from the lower classes “for their own protection.”
-Terry Renfield isn’t Terry Renfield. He’s actually the clone of Terry Renfield that was created for use in a plot to take down Control, but the real Terry switched places with the clone at the last minute.
And so Terry (or Clone Terry) goes along with the little band of conspirators for lack of a better option. I mean, what is he going to do? Turn them in and try explaining to Control why he was keeping company with known terrorists? It’s a good thing he doesn’t, because we wouldn’t have nearly the amount of satirical fun otherwise. Adam Wasserman (He’s the author. Did I forget to mention that?) has a biting wit tailor made for a black comedy like Thank You for Your Cooperation. We’re treated to satirical scenes and commentary related to bureaucracy, Homeland Security, television, child-rearing, environmentalism, politics, and socialized… anything. In doing so, he borrows from a lot of other classic dystopian works such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and Soylent Green (to name a few) and combines them with some of his own ideas to craft a rich and darkly hilarious world.
Part of what makes the satire so funny is the fact that much of the world in Thank You for Your Cooperation isn’t that different from our own. We’ve all bitched and complained about some of the same things. How many times have you spent an hour in line at the DMV only to be told, when you finally get to the front, that the line you want is at the other end of the office and you’ll need to go through that one, too? Who hasn’t, upon going through security at the airport, wondered what kind of pervert decided that having naked pictures taken of you should be a mandatory step in domestic travel? Except in Thank You for Your Cooperation, it’s all been puffed up and hyper-realized into a distortion of reality. It makes it easier to laugh at the sneering fourth grader ground into chunks by a mining drone, or the TV star dying of radiation poisoning, or any number of the hundreds of people that bite the dust due to government oversight and political backbiting. Of course, it helps that it’s a book and it’s not real, but it doesn’t change the fact that the satire is, in the words of my favorite English professor, “well taken.” Dystopia is mostly a serious genre, and these days it seems like there’s no shortage of dystopian books coming out with tales about hardship, loss, “the endurance of the human spirit,” and other bullshit buzz phrases. Wasserman’s facetious treatment of the genre reminded me of the Escape from New York franchise, which is something sorely needed to balance out the “serious books are serious” vibe.
What’s the bad part, you might ask? Well there’s not much, I can tell you that. The structure of the story is a little here and there at one point, jumping forward to another scene, and then backtracking to explain how they all got there. And sometimes there are important details that come out of nowhere, such as the revelation that Terry is a hacker about 3/4 of the way into the book. Wasserman treats it rather flippantly, with a, “You didn’t know that? Oh well!” sort of attitude. It fits with the overall tone of the book, though, so it’s forgivable. It still doesn’t explain why, if Terry is such a good hacker, he didn’t know at least some of the shit about Mars and Earth and Control before the events of the story, but never you mind that. Worrying about those kinds of trivialities is how traitors are born, and you don’t want to be a traitor, do you? And besides, little things like that are what gives the book its Hitchhiker’s-Guide-to-the-Galaxy-crushed-under-a-government-issued-boot feel, so I was able to ignore it for enjoyment’s sake.
Overall, I give Thank You for Your Cooperation four out of five stars.
December 26, 2011
What a crazy book! It took me for quite a ride; I even went back and re-read certain parts after I had finished it. In my mind it was like I was watching a mash-up of 1984, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Total Recall while riding Space Mountain and eating the stuff they wrap sushi rolls with (closest thing I can think of I've eaten that might taste like an algae snack).
I really loved how the author gave his main character(s) a sense of humor. You're told the story of life in a so-called Utopian underground world through the eyes of a man who is smart, surprisingly moral, and handles laser guns with style. At one point the story randomly fast-forwards and while you are busy asking yourself what the heck did I miss? the next chapter starts of with something like, 'I know I've been skipping around, deal with it.' There were also some very valid points, serious thoughts on how we human beings treat our environment and each other. We always want to get to the next level regardless who we have to step on, blackmail or frame-- so hungry for power and status. I liked that this was a bit of a warning, I'd much rather become a recycling addict now than have my great grandkids have to live in an odd Bunker taking orders from Control and eating Vitamim and drinking Yellow Flavor.
One of the most random things about this book was that one of the characters is named Lady Lagrange--- add to it the way she is described as wearing crazy outfits and being in the entertainment industry, it was hard not to visualize a futuristic Lady Gaga wearing stick outfits, and of course her songs kept getting annoyingly stuck in my head.
I am very happy and thankful to have won this book from giveaways! This was a great, fast read with lots of twists and turns to keep you guessing!
I really loved how the author gave his main character(s) a sense of humor. You're told the story of life in a so-called Utopian underground world through the eyes of a man who is smart, surprisingly moral, and handles laser guns with style. At one point the story randomly fast-forwards and while you are busy asking yourself what the heck did I miss? the next chapter starts of with something like, 'I know I've been skipping around, deal with it.' There were also some very valid points, serious thoughts on how we human beings treat our environment and each other. We always want to get to the next level regardless who we have to step on, blackmail or frame-- so hungry for power and status. I liked that this was a bit of a warning, I'd much rather become a recycling addict now than have my great grandkids have to live in an odd Bunker taking orders from Control and eating Vitamim and drinking Yellow Flavor.
One of the most random things about this book was that one of the characters is named Lady Lagrange--- add to it the way she is described as wearing crazy outfits and being in the entertainment industry, it was hard not to visualize a futuristic Lady Gaga wearing stick outfits, and of course her songs kept getting annoyingly stuck in my head.
I am very happy and thankful to have won this book from giveaways! This was a great, fast read with lots of twists and turns to keep you guessing!
August 9, 2016
I received this book for free in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.
For me, the best way to describe this book is a revamped, rewritten, 1984 with a sense of humor. From the serious "shame on us for what we did to the environment to end up here" to characters that are so humorously depicted that it fun just to imagine in them your head...this book has it all.
For me, the best way to describe this book is a revamped, rewritten, 1984 with a sense of humor. From the serious "shame on us for what we did to the environment to end up here" to characters that are so humorously depicted that it fun just to imagine in them your head...this book has it all.
Want to read
February 5, 2012Influenced by PKD? Sounds kind of Penultimate Truth-ish. Guess I'll find out.
November 25, 2017
wwwow great read! Sooo funny and entertaining! So many unexpected developments! Great character development. So imaginative! Can't wait to read the other books in the series. This guy needs to get published he's awesome
August 2, 2012
I received Thank You For Your Cooperation By Adam Wasserman for free through Goodreads first reads giveaway. This takes a look at the future of people. In some ways this book reminds me of George Orwell's 1984. Wasserman looks at the growing of technology and how computers could one day be in charge of everyone’s life; and the idea of always being watched by what in this book is known as Control. This world people live in is known as the Bunker, and Control is a computer. In this world you can't trust anyone and everyone is out to better themselves. This world is not a utopia like it is said to be. This book is the story of one of the citizen's who live in this world. How they get mixed up into what is known as the Underground and try to take down Control. This is a world where people do not have freedom over their own lives; every aspect of their lives are planned and controlled, but there is nothing the people can do about it. This book is a rather hopeless tale; it makes you think about the horrors that can become of where we live. Though the book ends trying to give hope for the human race and the future; it also shows that if people bond together and know the truth and rise together they might bring a world they all would be proud of and want to live in but that fear keeps this world from existing. Fear is what keeps the human race oppressed. Thank you For your Cooperation is an interesting look at what the future could hold for the world with growing technology and a growing fear of the government that many people possess.
January 22, 2016
Got this book for free from Goodreads Giveaway Contest:
The story was SUPERB and AMAZING. I also really really love the main characters' sense of humour - they always made me chuckle a lot, from the exchange dialogue to their inner thoughts. There were a few part that hard to understand (that's why I couldn't give this book a 5), but aside from that, I really enjoyed the book.
One random thing I love is how he replaced the phrase "Oh God"(??) by "George Walker" in this future utopia universe. It did take me a while to realise it :) Also the character Lade Lagrange did remind me of Lady Gaga (I think this is also mentioned in another's review).
I think I will check out Adam's other novels when I have time. He is one of my favourite author now :)
The story was SUPERB and AMAZING. I also really really love the main characters' sense of humour - they always made me chuckle a lot, from the exchange dialogue to their inner thoughts. There were a few part that hard to understand (that's why I couldn't give this book a 5), but aside from that, I really enjoyed the book.
One random thing I love is how he replaced the phrase "Oh God"(??) by "George Walker" in this future utopia universe. It did take me a while to realise it :) Also the character Lade Lagrange did remind me of Lady Gaga (I think this is also mentioned in another's review).
I think I will check out Adam's other novels when I have time. He is one of my favourite author now :)
Read
October 13, 2013Won this book in the Goodreads First Reads giveaway. Waiting for it to arrive...
December 29, 2011
This book was a goodreads.com first read contest win.
This is a truly interesting sci-fi book, but somethings are hard for the reader to understand. Or at least to me they were hard to understand. I am not a sci-fi person unless it involves Star Trek with James T. Kirk and Spock. (lol yes part of the older generation.) Still the author has written a good book that is interesting. I liked the characters Sally and Terry.
This is my opinion on the book it does not reflect the book or the author. For your own opinion on the book please take the time to read it.
This is a truly interesting sci-fi book, but somethings are hard for the reader to understand. Or at least to me they were hard to understand. I am not a sci-fi person unless it involves Star Trek with James T. Kirk and Spock. (lol yes part of the older generation.) Still the author has written a good book that is interesting. I liked the characters Sally and Terry.
This is my opinion on the book it does not reflect the book or the author. For your own opinion on the book please take the time to read it.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews