Two Tales of the Future

Dystopian fiction is to literature what chairs are to architecture: If the successful tale-teller doesn’t take a crack at a gloomy view of the future, he’s no more world-class than an architect who doesn’t try to give us all lower back pain with an innovative machine for sitting in. So when two of my favorite fictional whiners, Paul Theroux and Margaret Atwood, perpetrated gloomy future stores almost simultaneously, I thought I’d run them through my sensors. Both are worth a go.
 
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton-Mifflin, $16.95) is shorter and more acidulous. It’s an inside narrative of the 22nd Century, when Falwell’s U.S.A. has escalated into the Republic of Gilead. Pollution—both moral and ecological—has engendered a sterility crisis, and abortion has become the regime’s most horrible crime.
 
To insure the future of what looks less and less of a human race, there are little genetic enclaves, each run by a commander and his wife, where, in a macabre act of procreation, the sperm-carrying commander mounts the handmaidens one by one. But at each ritual insemination, the barren wife “backstops” the womb of the night. Grow-tesque!
 
Needless to say, this monotheocracy has its liberating edges. “Aunts” guard the integrity of this stud farm, and one of the feistier captive wombs kills an Aunt in the toilet, dons her uniform and escapes to the outside and an underground Pleasure Palace where the commanders get their covert jollies.
 
She also follows her own lusty loves with the commander’s chauffeur and, with this kind of waggle introduced into an otherwise airtight system of repression, heads for the tall timber of Canada.
 
We never know whether she makes it, has tale having been discovered by a researcher who give a scholarly paper at the Twelfth Symposium in Gilead Studies, held at the University of Denay, Nunavit (groan, I just got the pun, typing it) in 2195.
 
Atwood’s point is that the counter-revolution against feminism represented by the Moral Majoritarians inevitably will lead to these absurd forms of sexual exploitation. The point of view is that of an oppressed female seeking release.
 
Paul Theroux’s The O-Zone (Putnam, $19.95) is more a plague on all your genders. It turns the American Garden of Eden myth inside out: “What had been a disaster area was now the last great chance in America.” That is the dream of Hardy, a geophysicist for Asfalt, a corporation which seeks to dump excess petroleum on devastated areas, creating mountains of t he stuff so huge that they can change the weather and turn barren regions back into green.
 
It is multi-national hubris at its most egregious. The O-Zone is a part of the Ozarks in southwestern Missouri that has been officially abandoned because the scheme for using its salt caves for storing nuclear waste has backfired.
 
This story begins with a New Year’s Eve party of owners from New York City who look for a lark by getting a rare pass to enter the O-Zone. The party backfires when these high-techies suddenly learn how helpless they are in the wilderness. Fizzy, the precocious hacker whiz, is captured by the Aliens, whose adaptation to their low-tech milieu eventually earns the humbled respect of the technocrat.
 
Fizzy’s mother, on another track, goes on a quest for Fizzy’s father. Fizzy was sired in the anonymous clinics where wealthy owner-ladies go to by serviced by mask-wearing penis-pushers. She finds him eventually as a Walden isolato in a post-earthquake California. He is an enforcer for the volunteer militia, Godseye, which flits about the countryside gunning down Aliens (all the underclasses who aren’t in the minuscule Elite) with high-tech weaponry.
 
There’s another pseudo-theology loose in this insane world, the Space Pilgrims. They perform security duties in New York’s cavernous high rises while waiting to be “elected” to populate space. And there’s Hooper, who falls in love with a teenage Alien and risks all to bring her back to make himself feel alive.
 
Two themes weave in and out of both of these tales: The triumph of media-manipulated sex has demeaned most humans to the point where they’re incapable of love; and technology, far from being the benign blessing we turn to whenever we feel a malaise, is a Sorcerer’s Apprentice whose service is worse than any peonage of yore.
 
Well, this Christmas our kids are getting jolly with laser weapons; and this season Madonna and Prince are urging them to do it. Now. Zap. Powie. Happy Holly!
 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, December 22, 1987