Status Symbols Get Weird
In the future, status symbols get really weird. Not that they do not have fairly weird history to look back upon. But this weirdness gets really personal. This is not a vision of the future that looks enticing:
“Grafts were skin stories: a distant descendant of tattoos, an inbred cousin of Braille. Before long, you could judge people’s worth and social class by the texture of their skin. The richest of us had skin like a great puffed-up flesh palimpsest—graft upon graft, deep as third-degree burns, healed in white-on-white curls and protrusions and ridges.”
Another Deposit at the Mountebank
The bleak future portrayed here has definite similarities to what came before. Don’t get too comfortable about this future, either; we’re only talking about 2049. The cult of personality is still going strong among those who make really questionable decisions about who is worth following and worshiping as a social savior. The imagery may strike some as almost grotesquely familiar. At the same time, however, can one honesty say they come across the word mountebank too often in life? It is an exceptionally good choice for conveying a certain image of a person:
“People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can’t happen. If it doesn’t exist in thought, then it can’t exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan. A war-hungry mountebank.”
Before the Beginning of the End
Imagery is used to great effect to open the story. The book begins with short Prologue before Chapter One which describes a cataclysmic mass extinction event caused by the arrival of an asteroid. The Prologue ends with imagery of dark foreshadowing:
“In the hundreds of thousands of years before the Chicxulub asteroid impact that led to the mass extinction of dinosaurs on earth, volcanoes in a region of India known as the Deccan Traps erupted repeatedly. They spewed sulfur and carbon dioxide, poisoning the atmosphere and destabilizing ecosystems..The Deccan Traps changed the ecosystem radically. Blotted out the sun. Death became history, geography rewrote itself. And yet earth was reborn. It was not a miracle that life was destroyed and then re-emerged. It was the raging stubbornness of living organisms that simply would not give in. The next time a geocataclysm like this happened, the origin was anything but random.”
Dealing with Trauma
Much of the narrative is devoted to examinations of various forces at play in the social structure of existence. Philosophical concepts are contemplated. Political ideologies are poked and prodded. Very often, that which is being analyzed is psychological in nature. Such as, for instance, the ways the human mind responds to the most unpleasant and disturbing of sensory input:
“A calm like the eye of a hurricane comes over Christine. Time opens, briefly. There are different ways to understand cruelty. One can observe it, in which case the scene can become a kind of aesthetic, as with a play or painting or a film; regardless of the emotions evoked by the display, the distance keeps the viewer safe from harm. It is said that those who are forced to repeatedly observe brutality adopt this point of view as a survival strategy.”
