For all his many fiction works — covering such genres as horror, mystery, suspense, science fiction and the occasional mainstream title — Dan Simmons has yet to write a genuine dystopian novel. That is, until now. With FLASHBACK, Simmons takes most of the contemporary world’s problems and extrapolates them to create one of the most depressing futures you’re likely to read — all the more so because, for all its outrageousness, it could happen.
The story takes place in a not-too-distant future. The United States is near total collapse, brought upon when the financial world disintegrated during a time commonly known as “The Day It All Hit the Fan.” Most states are struggling to survive, and a few have left the union to from independent republics.
Islamic extremists have conquered most of the Middle Eastern world, as well as parts of the U.S., and armies of Mexican/Spanish reconquista are fighting their way northward. Rather than work to make things better, 85 percent of the population is addicted to a drug called flashback, which allows users to vividly re-experience the past while their bodies lie inert for hours at a time.
One such flash-addict is Nick Bottom, once a highly regarded Denver Police detective. Then his wife died in a car crash, and he retreated into a flash-induced haze for six years, costing him his job and his teenage son, Val, who was sent to live with Bottom’s father in Los Angeles. Now Bottom has been hired to privately investigate the murder of the son of a top government advisor. It’s a case he investigated six years ago while still on the police force, but never closed.
Bottom desperately needs the huge amount of money the assignment offers. So he convinces the adviser that he can revisit the past using flashback, re-examine the evidence and suspects, and this time, find the killer. It’s mostly bluster on his part, but he nonetheless gets the job and immediately uses a pay advance to stock up on vials of flashback, hoping to steal some hours to relive precious moments with his beloved dead wife.
Instead, he finds himself under constant watch of one of the adviser’s muscular bodyguards, who forces Bottom to solve the murder the old-fashioned way: through in-person interviews with the aging surviving suspects and research, allowing only minimal use of flashback.
Simmons kicks his imagination into overdrive with the presentation of his downbeat future world, leaving few details or situations unexplained. For example, the financial crisis has forced shopping malls and other commercial buildings to become housing areas for the mostly unemployed population. Thus, Bottom lives in a cubicle portion of what was once a Baby Gap store in a Denver-area mall. Other local and international conditions are either discussed or recalled in every chapter. It’s all so disheartening that it’s no wonder most of the world seeks refuge in a drug that transports them to a kindler, gentler time.
But the author works equally hard to keep the murder mystery the real driving force of his novel. In alternating chapters, we meet the estranged Val, and follow him from his dead-end life as a member of a violent, lawbreaking flash-gang to a desperate escape with his grandfather from Southern California before the outbreak of another reconquista attack.
Weighing in at 550 pages — about average for a Simmons novel these days — the story feels uneven at times, but still moves resolutely toward its unexpected conclusion, getting Bottom tangled up in a mess of political skullduggery and struggles for world dominance.
FLASHBACK is compelling reading, yet still manages to be suspenseful and downright entertaining in the midst of all its bleak forecasting. Ray Bradbury once said that he hoped to be remembered as someone who prevents futures rather than predicts them. Simmons obviously falls under the same category with this new work. But you’ll want to finish reading it first before thinking about ways to keep it all from happening. —Alan Cranis
Related posts:
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
No mention of how Simmons lays the blame for his dystopia on President Obama? That’s what makes an already paranoid, distasteful book even more unpleasant.
An interesting book, but it ultimately sunk under all the far-right-wing propaganda. Everything in this future is a result of liberal policies, and, as Sam mentions, can be traced back to one president? That’s too simplistic for a writer of Simmons’ usual quality.
The description from the author’s website makes it sound like the teabagger version of the Turner Diaries.
He says its his first post-apocalyptic novel but he’s written other works that have a similar theme of advanced technology turning everyone into Eloi like creatures.