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2020
An autocratic United States president who has shredded the nation of its freedoms, imprisoning dissidents, declaring the country a “Christian Nation,” and who is willing to go to any length to win the next election—that’s Fremont Ferris (for Philip K. Dick fans, a reversal of the name of the president, Ferris Fremont, in his novel, Radio Free Albemuth). Luke Evangelista, a down-and-out writer with a conscience, goes after the president when he learns that a supposed terror attack was actually staged to rally support for the president in the upcoming election. 2020 is both an edge-of-your-seat political thriller and a sophisticated analysis of the kinds of rebellion that can bring such a dictatorial leader down. "...a parable for our current predicament, offering the lens of fiction as a way to see options, possibilities, and dangers looming on our political horizon." Rivera Sun, peace activist and author of "The Dandelion Revolution" "2020 scares me. It's so utterly credible,so damn possible, that it sent me running for cover—only to find that there is no cover. Don't say Casey Dorman didn't warn us." Leslie Bohem, Emmy-Award winning Screenwriter and Producer "Casey Dorman's 2020 is both terrifyingly relevant and downright plausible in our terrible, Trumped-up times. It's also a genuine thriller, with Rashomon-like twists and surprisingly (perhaps) fun to read." David P. Barash, professor emeritus of psychology, University of Washington, National Book Award Nominee, author of the forthcoming, "Through a Glass using science to understand our species.
- GenresFiction
224 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 17, 2017
4 people are currently reading
8 people want to read
About the author
Casey Dorman
46 books23 followersCasey Dorman is a former university professor and dean, a psychologist, a literary review editor, an essayist, and the author of fourteen novels, a collection of short stories and poems, and three non-fiction books, including a volume in the Johns Hopkins Series on Neuroscience and Psychiatry. He is the former editor and publisher of the literary magazine, "Lost Coast Review." His fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. He has published academic and research articles in psychology, medical, public health and philosophy journals. He is a member of the Society of Philosophers in America. His most recent novel is the sci-fi thriller, “Ezekiel’s Brain,” published by NewLink Publishing in 2021. He is working on the sequel. He and his wife, Lai, live in Southern California and enjoy traveling, wine-tasting, gardening, and visiting with their children, grandchildren and great-grandchild as well as their nieces and nephews.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 8, 2017
Stop me if you've heard this. There's this President of the United States who has no regard for the law or the Constitution. His only interest is consolidating his power. He labels the press as "fake news" and creates his own reality built on people's fears. He institutes rules which keep immigrants from almost all non-white countries out. Oh! You've heard this story? Yeah. me too.
Well, what this book does is take our present situation and builds off of it. In the book, the President is nearing the time to run for re-election, the year 2020. In order to consolidate support, he creates a "terrorist" attack in a night club and places the blame on a muslim extremist. The only problem is, most of the killing was done by government agents and they left a few witnesses alive who could tell the story. A journalist is meets one of the witnesses and decides he must tell the story and stop the President from riding the fear right into a second term. That's enough of the story to get you started.
If you're a Trump supporter, don't read this book. It will only raise your blood pressure. If you're a Trump hater with paranoid tendencies, don't read this book either. It will only feed your fears. Everyone else, this is a really good book. A political thriller with edge of your seat action, plus it's a lot of fun to compare the book characters to the real life White House characters they parody. I had a few problems with the book. First, there is a big pacifist element in the book that is simply not existent in today's society. I, myself , am a pacifist, so i wish it were so, but it's not and its prominence in the book makes it less believable. Also, i found the ending of the book questionable, but it's the author's world and the book DID need to end. Sometimes you just gotta believe and let it go.
Well, what this book does is take our present situation and builds off of it. In the book, the President is nearing the time to run for re-election, the year 2020. In order to consolidate support, he creates a "terrorist" attack in a night club and places the blame on a muslim extremist. The only problem is, most of the killing was done by government agents and they left a few witnesses alive who could tell the story. A journalist is meets one of the witnesses and decides he must tell the story and stop the President from riding the fear right into a second term. That's enough of the story to get you started.
If you're a Trump supporter, don't read this book. It will only raise your blood pressure. If you're a Trump hater with paranoid tendencies, don't read this book either. It will only feed your fears. Everyone else, this is a really good book. A political thriller with edge of your seat action, plus it's a lot of fun to compare the book characters to the real life White House characters they parody. I had a few problems with the book. First, there is a big pacifist element in the book that is simply not existent in today's society. I, myself , am a pacifist, so i wish it were so, but it's not and its prominence in the book makes it less believable. Also, i found the ending of the book questionable, but it's the author's world and the book DID need to end. Sometimes you just gotta believe and let it go.
September 30, 2017
In 2020, Casey Dorman seeks to rebalance the narrative around political power, lifting up nonviolent struggle as an essential - and effective - force for change. In the genre of political fiction, nonviolent action is often ignored or dismissed as unrealistic. He digs into the different types of nonviolent struggle, including the principled and strategic, and also posits scenes that play out the effects of violent acts or sabotage. For this reason, 2020 comes much closer to portraying the reality of a diverse and complex landscape of political power than most other political thrillers. As a novelist and a trainer in nonviolent struggle, my perspective is that more of our literature needs to encompass the truth that nonviolent struggle is on the rise, globally and domestically, and is becoming one of the most effective forces of change in our world. The ways in which Casey Dorman shows the many configurations of resistance provide ample food for thought for anyone seeking to make change. His novel is a parable for our current predicament, offering the lens of fiction as a way to see options, possibilities, and dangers looming in our political horizon.
October 22, 2017
NOTE: The author graciously gave me a copy of this book and asked me to write a review.
Political thrillers have been around about as long as politics itself, but their popularity tends to come and go with the public interest in things political. So, it stands to reason that the highly divisive 2016 Presidential election will lead to its share of fictional offspring. One of the first novels inspired by that election is Casey Dorman’s 2020, a look at an America of the near future presided over by a President who bears a striking similarity (at least in the author’s mind) to the current occupant of the Oval Office. And, while the author is not afraid to make his opinions known about current politics, he does so in a manner better suited for a political treatise rather than a thriller.
The fictional President in Dorman’s 2020 is Fremont Ferris, a fairly obvious stand-in for Donald Trump who has managed to dismantle a number of our country’s constitutional rights in the name of national security. Despite, or perhaps, because all of this, he trails badly in the polls, so, in a desperate attempt to retain power, he orchestrates a massacre at a crowded nightclub (similar to the actual 2016 shooting in Orlando) and pins the blame on Islamic terrorists. Unfortunately for his plan, a handful of witnesses saw government agents doing the shooting. Lucas Evangelista, a journalist and long-time Ferris critic, tries to gather enough evidence against Ferris for a major expose, while, at the same time, dodging the various law enforcement agencies looking to silence him and those few remaining witnesses.
2020 belongs to a sub-genre known as the cautionary political thriller. As exemplified by George Orwell’s 1984, this type of book tries to warn the public about what might happen in the not-too-distant future under the wrong set of circumstances. To succeed, the cautionary thriller must either be plausible enough for readers to accept that its premise could occur, or be exciting enough that readers just don’t care how plausible the premise might be, like a James Bond novel. The best cautionary thrillers, such as Tom Clancy’s novels, are both plausible and exciting; 2020, on the other hand, is neither.
2020 posits a United States in which “subversive” books are regularly banned, dissidents are thrown into prison indefinitely, and other constitutional abuses routinely occur, all without much of a protest or challenge in the courts. That’s a huge set of premises to swallow. On a more practical level, the book starts with a Muslim with a grudge against a co-worker getting a gun and deciding to shoot his nemesis in the bar (not all that implausible) and, for some reason, cruising Jihadist websites for reasons never really made clear, and that the government could send several armed agents into the nightclub on that very night and get them in and out after shooting dozens of people without leaving any traces of forensic evidence, and with the acquiescence of what would have to be a dozen local, state, and federal police agencies and zillions of big and small news agencies, bloggers, and the like. That dog simply won’t hunt, and the book’s credibility actually goes downhill from there.
That lack of any semblance of plausibility wouldn’t matter, of course, if the book were an engaging “innocent man on the run” novel, but it’s not. There’s very little real action in the book, and, since most of the book is written in the first person from Evangelista’s perspective, he’s not around when most of what there is occurs. Indeed, there is little tension or pressure on Evangelista and his associates to keep on the move (weeks or months go by at times from one chapter to the next). Instead, Evangelista mostly argues politics with some of the people around him.
The author is quite open about acknowledging that 2020 is inspired by his political beliefs, and Evangelista frequently serves as the author’s surrogate in propounding them. The author has Evangelista debate some people with opposing points of view, but they are laughable straw men buffoons, whose arguments are about as well reasoned as a fifth grader’s civics essay. These frequent debates slow down the pace of the book considerably, and, by having the opposing points of view so poorly expressed, actually weaken the strength of the author’s own arguments.
I did find 2020 to be reasonably well written, although some better copy editing would definitely have helped. The author’s descriptive passages of the areas through which Evangelista travels are quite good. However, if the author’s goal was to advance his political viewpoints, then cutting through the conventional trappings of the thriller and presenting his arguments directly rather than using the fictional Evangelista as a mouthpiece would have been considerably more effective. As it is, 2020 is just too far-fetched to support the author’s talking points and not exciting enough to simply enjoy as a thriller.
Political thrillers have been around about as long as politics itself, but their popularity tends to come and go with the public interest in things political. So, it stands to reason that the highly divisive 2016 Presidential election will lead to its share of fictional offspring. One of the first novels inspired by that election is Casey Dorman’s 2020, a look at an America of the near future presided over by a President who bears a striking similarity (at least in the author’s mind) to the current occupant of the Oval Office. And, while the author is not afraid to make his opinions known about current politics, he does so in a manner better suited for a political treatise rather than a thriller.
The fictional President in Dorman’s 2020 is Fremont Ferris, a fairly obvious stand-in for Donald Trump who has managed to dismantle a number of our country’s constitutional rights in the name of national security. Despite, or perhaps, because all of this, he trails badly in the polls, so, in a desperate attempt to retain power, he orchestrates a massacre at a crowded nightclub (similar to the actual 2016 shooting in Orlando) and pins the blame on Islamic terrorists. Unfortunately for his plan, a handful of witnesses saw government agents doing the shooting. Lucas Evangelista, a journalist and long-time Ferris critic, tries to gather enough evidence against Ferris for a major expose, while, at the same time, dodging the various law enforcement agencies looking to silence him and those few remaining witnesses.
2020 belongs to a sub-genre known as the cautionary political thriller. As exemplified by George Orwell’s 1984, this type of book tries to warn the public about what might happen in the not-too-distant future under the wrong set of circumstances. To succeed, the cautionary thriller must either be plausible enough for readers to accept that its premise could occur, or be exciting enough that readers just don’t care how plausible the premise might be, like a James Bond novel. The best cautionary thrillers, such as Tom Clancy’s novels, are both plausible and exciting; 2020, on the other hand, is neither.
2020 posits a United States in which “subversive” books are regularly banned, dissidents are thrown into prison indefinitely, and other constitutional abuses routinely occur, all without much of a protest or challenge in the courts. That’s a huge set of premises to swallow. On a more practical level, the book starts with a Muslim with a grudge against a co-worker getting a gun and deciding to shoot his nemesis in the bar (not all that implausible) and, for some reason, cruising Jihadist websites for reasons never really made clear, and that the government could send several armed agents into the nightclub on that very night and get them in and out after shooting dozens of people without leaving any traces of forensic evidence, and with the acquiescence of what would have to be a dozen local, state, and federal police agencies and zillions of big and small news agencies, bloggers, and the like. That dog simply won’t hunt, and the book’s credibility actually goes downhill from there.
That lack of any semblance of plausibility wouldn’t matter, of course, if the book were an engaging “innocent man on the run” novel, but it’s not. There’s very little real action in the book, and, since most of the book is written in the first person from Evangelista’s perspective, he’s not around when most of what there is occurs. Indeed, there is little tension or pressure on Evangelista and his associates to keep on the move (weeks or months go by at times from one chapter to the next). Instead, Evangelista mostly argues politics with some of the people around him.
The author is quite open about acknowledging that 2020 is inspired by his political beliefs, and Evangelista frequently serves as the author’s surrogate in propounding them. The author has Evangelista debate some people with opposing points of view, but they are laughable straw men buffoons, whose arguments are about as well reasoned as a fifth grader’s civics essay. These frequent debates slow down the pace of the book considerably, and, by having the opposing points of view so poorly expressed, actually weaken the strength of the author’s own arguments.
I did find 2020 to be reasonably well written, although some better copy editing would definitely have helped. The author’s descriptive passages of the areas through which Evangelista travels are quite good. However, if the author’s goal was to advance his political viewpoints, then cutting through the conventional trappings of the thriller and presenting his arguments directly rather than using the fictional Evangelista as a mouthpiece would have been considerably more effective. As it is, 2020 is just too far-fetched to support the author’s talking points and not exciting enough to simply enjoy as a thriller.
October 22, 2017
NOTE: The author graciously gave me a copy of this book and asked me to write a review.
Political thrillers have been around about as long as politics itself, but their popularity tends to come and go with the public interest in things political. So, it stands to reason that the highly divisive 2016 Presidential election will lead to its share of fictional offspring. One of the first novels inspired by that election is Casey Dorman’s 2020, a look at an America of the near future presided over by a President who bears a striking similarity (at least in the author’s mind) to the current occupant of the Oval Office. And, while the author is not afraid to make his opinions known about current politics, he does so in a manner better suited for a political treatise rather than a thriller.
The fictional President in Dorman’s 2020 is Fremont Ferris, a fairly obvious stand-in for Donald Trump who has managed to dismantle a number of our country’s constitutional rights in the name of national security. Despite, or perhaps, because all of this, he trails badly in the polls, so, in a desperate attempt to retain power, he orchestrates a massacre at a crowded nightclub (similar to the actual 2016 shooting in Orlando) and pins the blame on Islamic terrorists. Unfortunately for his plan, a handful of witnesses saw government agents doing the shooting. Lucas Evangelista, a journalist and long-time Ferris critic, tries to gather enough evidence against Ferris for a major expose, while, at the same time, dodging the various law enforcement agencies looking to silence him and those few remaining witnesses.
2020 belongs to a sub-genre known as the cautionary political thriller. As exemplified by George Orwell’s 1984, this type of book tries to warn the public about what might happen in the not-too-distant future under the wrong set of circumstances. To succeed, the cautionary thriller must either be plausible enough for readers to accept that its premise could occur, or be exciting enough that readers just don’t care how plausible the premise might be, like a James Bond novel. The best cautionary thrillers, such as Tom Clancy’s novels, are both plausible and exciting; 2020, on the other hand, is neither.
2020 posits a United States in which “subversive” books are regularly banned, dissidents are thrown into prison indefinitely, and other constitutional abuses routinely occur, all without much of a protest or challenge in the courts. That’s a huge set of premises to swallow. On a more practical level, the book starts with a Muslim with a grudge against a co-worker getting a gun and deciding to shoot his nemesis in the bar (not all that implausible) and, for some reason, cruising Jihadist websites for reasons never really made clear, and that the government could send several armed agents into the nightclub on that very night and get them in and out after shooting dozens of people without leaving any traces of forensic evidence, and with the acquiescence of what would have to be a dozen local, state, and federal police agencies and zillions of big and small news agencies, bloggers, and the like. That dog simply won’t hunt, and the book’s credibility actually goes downhill from there.
That lack of any semblance of plausibility wouldn’t matter, of course, if the book were an engaging “innocent man on the run” novel, but it’s not. There’s very little real action in the book, and, since most of the book is written in the first person from Evangelista’s perspective, he’s not around when most of what there is occurs. Indeed, there is little tension or pressure on Evangelista and his associates to keep on the move (weeks or months go by at times from one chapter to the next). Instead, Evangelista mostly argues politics with some of the people around him.
The author is quite open about acknowledging that 2020 is inspired by his political beliefs, and Evangelista frequently serves as the author’s surrogate in propounding them. The author has Evangelista debate some people with opposing points of view, but they are laughable straw men buffoons, whose arguments are about as well reasoned as a fifth grader’s civics essay. These frequent debates slow down the pace of the book considerably, and, by having the opposing points of view so poorly expressed, actually weaken the strength of the author’s own arguments.
I did find 2020 to be reasonably well written, although some better copy editing would definitely have helped. The author’s descriptive passages of the areas through which Evangelista travels are quite good. However, if the author’s goal was to advance his political viewpoints, then cutting through the conventional trappings of the thriller and presenting his arguments directly rather than using the fictional Evangelista as a mouthpiece would have been considerably more effective. As it is, 2020 is just too far-fetched to support the author’s talking points and not exciting enough to simply enjoy as a thriller.
Political thrillers have been around about as long as politics itself, but their popularity tends to come and go with the public interest in things political. So, it stands to reason that the highly divisive 2016 Presidential election will lead to its share of fictional offspring. One of the first novels inspired by that election is Casey Dorman’s 2020, a look at an America of the near future presided over by a President who bears a striking similarity (at least in the author’s mind) to the current occupant of the Oval Office. And, while the author is not afraid to make his opinions known about current politics, he does so in a manner better suited for a political treatise rather than a thriller.
The fictional President in Dorman’s 2020 is Fremont Ferris, a fairly obvious stand-in for Donald Trump who has managed to dismantle a number of our country’s constitutional rights in the name of national security. Despite, or perhaps, because all of this, he trails badly in the polls, so, in a desperate attempt to retain power, he orchestrates a massacre at a crowded nightclub (similar to the actual 2016 shooting in Orlando) and pins the blame on Islamic terrorists. Unfortunately for his plan, a handful of witnesses saw government agents doing the shooting. Lucas Evangelista, a journalist and long-time Ferris critic, tries to gather enough evidence against Ferris for a major expose, while, at the same time, dodging the various law enforcement agencies looking to silence him and those few remaining witnesses.
2020 belongs to a sub-genre known as the cautionary political thriller. As exemplified by George Orwell’s 1984, this type of book tries to warn the public about what might happen in the not-too-distant future under the wrong set of circumstances. To succeed, the cautionary thriller must either be plausible enough for readers to accept that its premise could occur, or be exciting enough that readers just don’t care how plausible the premise might be, like a James Bond novel. The best cautionary thrillers, such as Tom Clancy’s novels, are both plausible and exciting; 2020, on the other hand, is neither.
2020 posits a United States in which “subversive” books are regularly banned, dissidents are thrown into prison indefinitely, and other constitutional abuses routinely occur, all without much of a protest or challenge in the courts. That’s a huge set of premises to swallow. On a more practical level, the book starts with a Muslim with a grudge against a co-worker getting a gun and deciding to shoot his nemesis in the bar (not all that implausible) and, for some reason, cruising Jihadist websites for reasons never really made clear, and that the government could send several armed agents into the nightclub on that very night and get them in and out after shooting dozens of people without leaving any traces of forensic evidence, and with the acquiescence of what would have to be a dozen local, state, and federal police agencies and zillions of big and small news agencies, bloggers, and the like. That dog simply won’t hunt, and the book’s credibility actually goes downhill from there.
That lack of any semblance of plausibility wouldn’t matter, of course, if the book were an engaging “innocent man on the run” novel, but it’s not. There’s very little real action in the book, and, since most of the book is written in the first person from Evangelista’s perspective, he’s not around when most of what there is occurs. Indeed, there is little tension or pressure on Evangelista and his associates to keep on the move (weeks or months go by at times from one chapter to the next). Instead, Evangelista mostly argues politics with some of the people around him.
The author is quite open about acknowledging that 2020 is inspired by his political beliefs, and Evangelista frequently serves as the author’s surrogate in propounding them. The author has Evangelista debate some people with opposing points of view, but they are laughable straw men buffoons, whose arguments are about as well reasoned as a fifth grader’s civics essay. These frequent debates slow down the pace of the book considerably, and, by having the opposing points of view so poorly expressed, actually weaken the strength of the author’s own arguments.
I did find 2020 to be reasonably well written, although some better copy editing would definitely have helped. The author’s descriptive passages of the areas through which Evangelista travels are quite good. However, if the author’s goal was to advance his political viewpoints, then cutting through the conventional trappings of the thriller and presenting his arguments directly rather than using the fictional Evangelista as a mouthpiece would have been considerably more effective. As it is, 2020 is just too far-fetched to support the author’s talking points and not exciting enough to simply enjoy as a thriller.
February 13, 2018
Casey Dorman's 2020 is one of the best reads I've had in a while. I was captivated from the beginning and become increasingly alarmed with the plot revelations—the story is so plausibly terrifying. If only in reality there were more journalist like Luke Evangelista who risk everything to uncover the truth.
Fremont Ferris, president in 2020, will go to any means to ensure his reelection. He and his advisors misuse power to "guide" public opinion in the president's favor and subsequently decrease the people's rights in name of security. How far will it go before the truth starts coming to light? Scary read!
Fremont Ferris, president in 2020, will go to any means to ensure his reelection. He and his advisors misuse power to "guide" public opinion in the president's favor and subsequently decrease the people's rights in name of security. How far will it go before the truth starts coming to light? Scary read!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews