FutureLand, by Walter Mosley
To say that FutureLand is a thought-provoking book is an understatement. It has weaknesses, but it sucked me in -- I read the whole thing in one sitting last night, a three hundred page cruise that left me pondering. The fact that I'm still conflicted about the book's merits a day after reading it only makes it more intriguing. For pure reading pleasure, it ranks far below most of my scifi favorites. The quality of the writing is middle-of-the-pack, not enough to qualify as literature but far better than the Tor-published pulp that floods the scifi rack at your local Borders. Characterization is almost always a distant second to concept, some stories rely heavily on painfully phonetic vernacular, and like most writers taking a stab at the slippery cyberpunk genre, he seems to assume that "dystopia plus relationship" equals "cheap driveby sex."
In quite a few ways, though, Mosley repurposes the cyberpunk palette of information saturation, gene hacking, global corporations and militaristic businesses. Rather than stitch together the usual trendy popcorn about streetwise pan-ethnic outsiders beating the system in a post-corporate dystopia, he uses the nine linked short stories to tackle complex questions of racial and economic equality. While most authors assume a Trekkish racially neutral future, where ethnic tension is the domain of white-trash religious enclaves, Mosley envisions a 2030s world where today's complex issues of race, class, and inequality are amplified rather than erased. Protagonists are black -- African American? Negro? He uses a smorgasbord of racial terms but the message comes through. He's exploring the future of a race, the concept of a real life in a cyberpunk underclass, rather than a Mirrorshades Fantasy.
FutureLand kicks off with the story Ptolemy Bent -- Popo, as his stroke-ridden mother calls him. Ptolemy's a bright kid of two and a half years: he can read, he understands complicated ideas, and he loves to learn. Problem is, he's part of the black underclass. Barefoot and wild, he learns via a stolen computer and a pirated library of congress archive courtesy his ex-con uncle. His uncle fights to keep the kid at home, hiding him from welfare workers who want to IQ-test Ptolemy and haul him off to magnate schools where he'll be taught to work and turned into a corporate cog. As Ptolemy tinkers, plays with old radios, and grows, he hears voices others have missed -- something out there in the information noise. Is it God? Is it an alien intelligence? Who knows -- he's arrested and sent to life on an island prison before his genius can bear fruit.
It's confusing at first. Unlike most short scifi collections, FutureLand's nine pieces are all woven together, connected by a larger narrative that spans several decades. Ptolemy's story bears the weight of introducing key ideas other pieces will build on, and while it's interesting it takes three or four more stories for some of the bits in the first one to make sense. Mosley's vision of the 2030s is grim like a government poverty reportThe constitution mandates employment for those who qualify, leaving those who don't to a crushing life of poverty. Criminal convictions? Too stressed to work? Sorry, you're off the dole and living in Common Ground, a nationwide network of underground subsidized living. You're sleeping in tubes, eating free beans and rice for months at a time, and praying for the next employment cycle, when you might get a shot at flipping burgers.
Other stories cut to different angles: One explores the fate of a convicted hacker, stripped of citizenship and shipped to a corporate prison island beyond the reach of national law. Shackled, drugged, and monitored for thought-crimes, he's told he'll be set free if he goes three years without a black mark. It's an impossible task, though, and he faces a life of harvesting the prison's tobacco crop for the man. Another story follows the knife-edge drama of a radical petitioning the most powerful man on the planet -- the God of a corporate empire, the founder of a new InfoTech religion. The radical's betting his own life to save a nation of impoverished Africans from corporate takeover. If he fails, it's up to his compatriots to take up arms and stop the corporation the hard way. As the stories play out, common threads start pulling together and it becomes clear that the narratives are connected by more than just themes. There's a racial war brewing, with white supremacists, bioengineering terrorists, and multinational conglomerates locked in a struggle for power.
Mosley is clearly, obviously, unambiguously throwing the issue of race and class struggle in the reader's face. Sometimes it gets in the way of cleanly flowing narrative, and other times it reads like a conservative commentator's dream straw man come true. "What? Murderers should be let off the hook because they were impoverished? Nonsense! The black man is being kept down by the powerful elites? Silliness!" He's persistent, though. While most science fiction is willing to paint poverty with a few quick brush strokes and move on to the geeky bits, Mosley dwells. He raises questions and offers no answers. He presents uncomfortable, difficult scenarios. His characters do bad things and sometimes are untroubled by them.
But FutureLand, above all else, forces thought. It forces you to engage and question and ponder Mosley's vision in a way that very few works of scifi do. Bruce Sterling once said that all good science fiction is really about the present. While the intensity of FutureLand's racial and economic divide may seem extreme, a trip to present day inner city enclaves like Cabrini Green makes it clear that the problem is here today. If we aren't willing to confront it now, a few decades of exotic implants, biotech, and faster broadband won't eliminate the problem.
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