Public Eye: An Investigation into the Disappearance of the World

by Brian Fawcett

Parallel stories deal with the disappearance of everything human, humane and individual in the world, by examining the media, networks, the New Age movement, post modernism and the deconstructionists

256 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1990

Reviews

[Joseph Matheny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though this book was written in the 90s, it is still relevant today.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered this book years ago when one of the chapters ("Soul Walker," which is still one of my favorites) was collected in an anthology. It took me a long time to track down an actual copy. This is a very, very strange book, but I enjoyed it considerably more than I first expected to. Part of it it is a fictional story of a sort of vigilante detective type (the Public Eye of the title, who narrates) investigating the efforts of some shadowy corporate malevolence to make humanity into soulless consuming machines. The rest (bottom third of each page, roughly) is a sort of frame story, commentary by the author on the real-world technological and social forces behind this story and the process of writing it. It's a weird gimmick (and was especially frustrating for me visually at first). but it mostly works. I'd recommend, like Fawcett does in the introduction, not reading all the way through one or the other story strand, but jumping back-and-forth as your interests change (I mostly did this every chapter or so, which worked pretty well). The writing in both parts is good, if occasionally info-dumpy, and the voices of Public Eye and Fawcett are nicely distinct. The fictional part is twisted, darkly funny, inventive, and occasionally insightful. It's understandably doom and gloom at points, given the subject matter, but there's an interesting revolutionary optimism too. The "nonfiction" commentary by Fawcett is interesting (some insights about social psychology and bureaucracy, and outdated musings on artificial intelligence) but comes across as kind of paranoid (portly, admittedly, because I'm considerably less economically unorthodox and socially super-liberal then it sounds like Fawcett is). On the whole it feels strangely both dated (it was written in 1990) and prescient, given our current sociopolitical climate (Man oh man, what Public Eye would have to say about the Internet/social media and how nicely it all fits into the big scheme). It's odd to read all this handwringing about some catastrophe set to befall civilization by the new millennium from 17 years post-millennium and think, "Yeah, most of the elements of that are still here." Sure, it's overblown, but not entirely, in an unsettling way. I found it really thought-provoking, and, if definitely darker than I usually like, compelling and sometimes really funny. I think a lot of people wouldn't like the whole thing, but the various parts can definitely be read in isolation if you can find them (The fictional story somewhat more so). So I'd recommend trying to find some excerpts or some of Fawcett's shorter work, and picking this up if you like what you see there, to at least explore if not read it it's entirety. It will definitely make you think.