13) Futureland by Walter Mosley
Futureland is a cyberpunk tale by Walter Mosley. It's filled with witty and sensitive portrayals of unique individuals locked in mortal combat with a corporatized world. It's been reviewed here before, so I'll leave my detailed thoughts under a cut.
It's a fairly disjointed book. Some of the sections depict long and complicated and ambiguous rebellions against The System that appear to have little connection to anything else in the story. There is the story of an imprisoned hacker who sacrifices himself to free his fellow inmates. There is the tale of an untrained murderer who becomes One with the law. And then there is, aimlessly, filled with false starts, the rough and tortuous path of the main narrative, such as it is.
The corporations who run the world are working to maintain a status quo. The rebels are trying to liberate the minds of unknowingly enslaved creative souls. It is often intentionally unclear who is on what side. Slowly, they move toward confrontation, leaving twin wakes of death and enlightenment along the way.
It is a darkly optimistic story, and I say that without any sense of contradiction. The optimism comes from a belief, I think, that the things we fear are actually good for us. Change, independent thought, resisting the common good... these things lead to human empowerment and thereby cure a range of human ills. And what we cannot solve through faith and change, Mosley says, maybe someday we'll be able to solve through technology. And the novel ends with a character entering a new world.
And yet dark, because all of the characters are struggling with oppression and love and death and pain and all the darkness of humanity. And dark, because the hopeful ending is marred by an almost casually referenced nuclear/virological holocaust. But since that holocaust is essentially a cosmic joke, there is nothing deeply contradictory here either.
It's a fairly disjointed book. Some of the sections depict long and complicated and ambiguous rebellions against The System that appear to have little connection to anything else in the story. There is the story of an imprisoned hacker who sacrifices himself to free his fellow inmates. There is the tale of an untrained murderer who becomes One with the law. And then there is, aimlessly, filled with false starts, the rough and tortuous path of the main narrative, such as it is.
The corporations who run the world are working to maintain a status quo. The rebels are trying to liberate the minds of unknowingly enslaved creative souls. It is often intentionally unclear who is on what side. Slowly, they move toward confrontation, leaving twin wakes of death and enlightenment along the way.
It is a darkly optimistic story, and I say that without any sense of contradiction. The optimism comes from a belief, I think, that the things we fear are actually good for us. Change, independent thought, resisting the common good... these things lead to human empowerment and thereby cure a range of human ills. And what we cannot solve through faith and change, Mosley says, maybe someday we'll be able to solve through technology. And the novel ends with a character entering a new world.
And yet dark, because all of the characters are struggling with oppression and love and death and pain and all the darkness of humanity. And dark, because the hopeful ending is marred by an almost casually referenced nuclear/virological holocaust. But since that holocaust is essentially a cosmic joke, there is nothing deeply contradictory here either.