Order ORPHANS here
It's true that I am not an astronaut, though at one time I thought I might be. I am not even a good husband or father, but for this moment, gliding here toward the shore, weaving this way and that, amd hopping from wave to wave, I am something great, even if I have no idea exactly what that is.
Dystopian thoughts are a burning hot subject with intellectual masturbators in this day and age. Paranoia has become cool again in the post-9/11 era, so it's understandable. My favourite winded debate question is : how close are we to Orwell's 1984? Like we aren't already in the middle of it... Point is, good dystopian fiction is rare nowadays. Fiction that isn't overly satirical and that draws a future that can scare somebody living in the present. Enter Ben Tanzer, an author who understands a thing or two about the present, and his latest novel ORPHANS. It is a swift and elegiac little story about loving things you can't have anymore.
ORPHANS takes place in a future version of Chicago renamed Baidu, in a world that belongs to China. Norrin Rad got himself a job in a world where jobs are reserved for a privileged elite and he doesn't quite understand why. Only thing is that the work involves traveling to Mars for long periods of time. Norrin has a wife (Shalla) and a son (Joey), so he's not in love with the idea, yet he has to provide for his family. He also is a grown up punk child, who isn't enamored with working for The Coporation, the tentacular company that oversees and regulates the lives of everyone in the ''free world''. But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, right?
So, about that dystopian thing. ORPHANS delivers big, both consciously and unconsciously. That's what makes it a great read. Tanzer's point, as a realistic writer, was to illustrate the difficulty of maintaining a traditional relationship in a constantly changing world, but this concept is only part of what makes ORPHANS great. The world Tanzer draws is not hostile to Norrin. The action might be set in a distant future, but the world of ORPHANS is still like ours in many ways. Baidu is still a functionnal city with public transportation and a community life of some sort. While Orwell made his characters oblivious to the hostile nature of their everyday life, Tanzer makes both his characters and his readers partially oblivious to it, creating a very real and pertinent portrait of a totalitarian society that is not so far removed from ours.
''Earth is no longer a world where you can be yourselves and celebrate all you've done and earned over the many years your families were building something bettr, more stable, and more lasting. We all want roots and identity, social norms we understand, not to mention culture, art, beauty and love, friends and networks, kindship and life worth living to its fullest. And you can have that, here, now, soon,'' I go on to say, ''but you have to take a chance and you have to leave what you know behind.''
ORPHANS is written in short, almost independant vignettes, something that Tanzer's fans are already used to. Once again, it serves a purpose here. Ben Tanzer left no stones unturned. The vignettes break tension, they are like a reset button that's being pressed over and over again. It was crucial not to represent the society of ORPHANS as openly oppressive and schizo mechanics of the vignettes system was very effective in that regards. The oppressive aspects of Baidu never take any dramatic momentum and help you stay with the soulful Norrin, rather lose yourself in what could've turn into a cliché representation of a totalitarian future.
Our world is changing before our very eyes. The lives we've been thaught to live are becoming obsolete. What we were thaught was right is becoming wrong. What's what ORPHANS is about: our surrender of control over change. The world we created that has left us behind. ORPHANS is about the future, but the issues it raises are pertinent today. Ben Tanzer wrote a novel that is efficient and graceful, yet it is throbbing with political implications I'm not sure it quite understands. That, my friends, is a prime exemple of the alchemy that creates great literature. It is both deliberate and incidental.