Found guilty on seven counts of Treason-Speech and Questioning of Authority, school valedictorian and Patriot Scholar Adriane Strohl has been sentenced to four years in Exile. She counts herself lucky. She could have been deleted, or exiled forever, or her family could have been arrested as collaborators. Instead, she has been sent to the past, to study at the University of Wisconsin. The USA of 1963, with its sexism, secondhand smoking, girdles and no internet, is almost as bad a place to be a clever woman as her twenty-first century, and by implication our present is dystopic too, in so far as it reflects them.
She comes from a future where history began on September 11, “a True Democracy [where] all individuals are equal”, so high grades are risky, especially for girls. Home Security Public Safety Oversight is one of a mulitude of repressive new organisations; experiments are no longer part of the school curriculum, just so-called facts; the politician with the most money automatically becomes the party’s nominee; and people are divided by SkinTone categories. Adriane, an ST1, has never seen an actual ST10. It all feels very heavy-handed, but maybe that’s the satire the US needs at the moment.
The prose is straightforward, as if written for youngsters, but this book won’t offer teenage readers the catharsis they might expect from this genre: the plot concerns Adriane’s belief that she has identified a fellow exile, Ira Wolfman, not revolution. This isn't a novel that impresses with its sf ideas, and the characters and story could be more interesting, but overall it’s a decent read, and it does a good job of demonstrating how some things have improved since the sixties, and what the consequences could be of those gains being lost. Stephen Theaker ***
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