Close to the end of the twenty-first century, things don’t seem to have changed a great deal in the UK. The seventeenth Halo game is out, the Mercury Music Prize is still running, and economic inequality is still a serious problem. The one big difference is that those with the necessary wealth or privilege can “fix”: take drugs to stop the progression of ageing.
This novella is set in Oxford, and features a group of misfit youngsters – Nina, Alex, Fidget, Margo and Jasper – who share a house and steal fixing drugs to share with the underprivileged. Once they meet Daisy, the scientist involved in originally creating the drugs, their ambitions expand, but they don’t realise that among their number is a traitor.
This book got off to a bad start, with what is very nearly a “dubcon” (dubious consent) sex scene, and a woman in the body of a child, thanks to a medical intervention, who has been sexually active with adults. (A disturbing trope also present in The Black Tides of Heaven, from the same publisher.) Another woman’s body is praised for “her littleness” and “miniature curves”. If the rest isn’t quite as creepy, it wasn’t any better. Think the punk episode of Stranger Things, but worse. The reader is obviously expected to have little time for the traitor in the group, but these people do plan and carry out a terrorist attack on a civilian target.
They don’t go after the company that distributes the drugs, or the government which decides on the distribution of wealth and medicines, but after a group of elderly academics (and the people serving their meals). Their goal is explicitly ageist: to kill the elderly because they are getting in the way of the young.
A letter at the end mocks the idea of calling what they did terrorism, asking “what does that mean”, comparing it to “teenagers writing slogans on the walls” and “schoolkids reading the wrong books”. Nope. Detonating a bomb and killing people at a ball is definitely terrorism, and a book that tries to make out that it’s on the same level as those other things is definitely the wrong book.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, they also cook out-of-date food and recklessly distribute it to the poor. Stephen Theaker *
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