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SPOOKS: a dystopia
In the near future, the police state is veiled by an attention economy generating an endlessly diverting, vacuous spectacle which involves all the dwellers above its dungeons, via social media, in a narcissistic dance of ambition and performance.
Caroline Benjie is a naïve Candide come to the big city to find a life and career, like everyone else, through promotion via social media. She is living on the margins in Crown Heights when opportunity knocks, as it does in these times for young women who can attract eyeballs. Her newfound friend, the minicelebrity Amanda Abbey, arranges for her to work as a journalist at an up-and-coming radical publication, The Dilettante. Caroline is soon introduced into the murky and luxurious social circle orbiting the townhouse of Dan Hemingway, svengali of a hipster left media industry, where favours and strange errands are traded among the fashionable, well connected denizens. Caroline finds herself rising through the ranks of New York society, feted and showered with gifts and endless praise of her excellence. Is Empire a wonderful meritocracy after all, and is the insipid and unimaginative Caroline really the superior specimen of the species as she herself is increasingly convinced? Or is she a pawn chosen for her vanity and gullibility, a mere puppet in a spectacle behind which there are larger and by no means random forces at work? Is she delivering revolution to the people or is she selling the people bound hand and foot -- and strapped to electrical prods -- to her many anonymous sponsors?
E.M. Quangel's debut novel is a dystopic satirical spy novel, at once hilarious and harrowing while dissecting fame, fascism, revolution and reaction, in a future that is now.
Caroline Benjie is a naïve Candide come to the big city to find a life and career, like everyone else, through promotion via social media. She is living on the margins in Crown Heights when opportunity knocks, as it does in these times for young women who can attract eyeballs. Her newfound friend, the minicelebrity Amanda Abbey, arranges for her to work as a journalist at an up-and-coming radical publication, The Dilettante. Caroline is soon introduced into the murky and luxurious social circle orbiting the townhouse of Dan Hemingway, svengali of a hipster left media industry, where favours and strange errands are traded among the fashionable, well connected denizens. Caroline finds herself rising through the ranks of New York society, feted and showered with gifts and endless praise of her excellence. Is Empire a wonderful meritocracy after all, and is the insipid and unimaginative Caroline really the superior specimen of the species as she herself is increasingly convinced? Or is she a pawn chosen for her vanity and gullibility, a mere puppet in a spectacle behind which there are larger and by no means random forces at work? Is she delivering revolution to the people or is she selling the people bound hand and foot -- and strapped to electrical prods -- to her many anonymous sponsors?
E.M. Quangel's debut novel is a dystopic satirical spy novel, at once hilarious and harrowing while dissecting fame, fascism, revolution and reaction, in a future that is now.
- GenresFiction
119 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 1, 2014
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August 15, 2015
1984 sucks. This does not. Same general concept, but far more believable and well-executed. The satire is biting, the world portrayed is almost instantly recognizable, and the politics are actually incisive.
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