Gamechanger Offers a Wild, Thoughtful Vision of a Post-Post-Apocalyptic World
Sometime between now and 2101, things are going to get pretty bad for the people of Earth: an unnamed American president will succeed in accelerating a climate catastrophe that’s already well underway, leaving the planet devastated and its people in dire straits.
Gamechanger
Hardcover $27.99
Gamechanger
Hardcover $27.99
That’s the setup for L.X. Beckett’s new novel, Gamechanger, the latest in the recent flood of science fiction novels to attempt to grapple with the uncertainties of Earth’s next century, which seems guaranteed to be apocalyptic on one level or another. But this isn’t a story of the apocalypse, or even living in the ruins. It’s about what comes after: what happens as we try to claw our way back from the brink (or beyond it) and rebuild the world—keeping an eye on our social media stats all the while.
That’s the setup for L.X. Beckett’s new novel, Gamechanger, the latest in the recent flood of science fiction novels to attempt to grapple with the uncertainties of Earth’s next century, which seems guaranteed to be apocalyptic on one level or another. But this isn’t a story of the apocalypse, or even living in the ruins. It’s about what comes after: what happens as we try to claw our way back from the brink (or beyond it) and rebuild the world—keeping an eye on our social media stats all the while.
Cherub “Rubi” Whiting used to be a star of multiplayer virtual reality games, one of the chief preoccupations in the tumult of the year 2101. At the outset of the story, she’s made an unlikely career move: she’s now a public defender, and has just brought on her first client, a firebrand of internet controversy named Luciano Pox, who has been accused of carrying out acts of online terrorism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the case against him is anything but simple, and hides a deeper mystery that drives the narrative—just who is Pox anyway?
Rubi has never met her client in person, and though at first it seems as though Pox might simply be a clever hacker, the stakes get higher as the possibilities get stranger—he (they) might be an AI ushering in the long-awaited Singularity, or the advance scout of an invading army, or one of the individuals who, for various reasons, aren’t looking forward to a promised environmental restoration referred to as the Clawback—that slow process has made strides in restoring the Earth to an earlier, less polluted state (decades of economic devastation have actually helped to reduce humanity’s carbon footprint), but not everyone is happy about it. While managing all of this, Rubi is also forced to confront a conspiracy-obsessed father and help an old rival and love interest with her parenting problems. The plot isn’t beside the point by any means, but the wealth of detail is extraordinary and refreshing in the often plot-heavy genre of science fiction (or in this case: post-apocalyptic, post-human cyberpunk).
New York 2140
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New York 2140
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Like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Gamechanger slots into the new era of the post-post-apocalyptic novel; in both books, intertwined climate and economic catastrophes have devastated the world, and each kicks off their narrative as we’re beginning to emerge from the worst of the devastation. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that two of the most intriguingly forward-looking novels of recent years aren’t trying to warn us away from a coming dystopia, instead assuming that things will get much worse indeed, and then looking ahead to what will come next.
Like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Gamechanger slots into the new era of the post-post-apocalyptic novel; in both books, intertwined climate and economic catastrophes have devastated the world, and each kicks off their narrative as we’re beginning to emerge from the worst of the devastation. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that two of the most intriguingly forward-looking novels of recent years aren’t trying to warn us away from a coming dystopia, instead assuming that things will get much worse indeed, and then looking ahead to what will come next.
Given those mixed messages, it’s hard to call Gamechanger a hopeful novel, but it does offer a plausible possibility that the world of the future will at least be less bleak than the blighted landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s mega-depressing The Road (eventually anyway)—a sense that technology will be able to make up for quite a bit of what’s been lost. (Recall also the roughly contemporaneous, century-hence timeline of William Gibson’s The Peripheral and its forthcoming sequel Agency, a techno-wonderland in which nanbobots can make wild ideas into reality and towering carbon scrubbers have put the atmosphere on the mend—which seems really great until you remember that 80 percent of the world’s population died out in the interim, leaving a global city like London all but deserted).
It’s in imagining that world that Beckett triumphs—the novel drips with near-future verisimilitude, even (or particularly) in the way its characters frequently speak in hashtags, a quirk that would be annoyingly self-satisfied if it weren’t so effective. With the real world having become a bit rubbish, social media, AI, and virtual and augmented reality have combined in ways that seem inevitable, with characters spending precious little time in unaugmented space. The real world exists as more of a supplement to a fully integrated cyber-reality—spaces are readily available for short-term rental to those who want to casually enjoy a digitally enhanced experience (say, a simple balance beam that might be made to represent a building ledge in an action game). It makes sense that our interconnected, always-online society would find ways to survive and entertain even with the physical world in collapse. It’s either an appealing vision of human resourcefulness, or a damning indictment of our willingness to ignore the messes we’ve made of thing. (To paraphrase a popular meme: why not both?)
Child of a Hidden Sea
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Child of a Hidden Sea
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L.X. Beckett (revealed, on the copyright page, to be a pseudonym for award-winning fantasy author A.M. Dellamonica) seems to suggest a position of caution when it comes to social media (in 2101, everything is connected, and privacy is almost entirely a thing of the past), but she isn’t interested in scolding us for our online obsessions. Rather, our interconnectivity has brought the Doctorow-ian reputation economy to the fore: though a subsistence living is available to everyone in the form of basic shelter and printed protein (the only food remaining), social media determines one’s ability to obtain almost everything else, from luxury real-world items to in-game perks—personality quirks and bad moods are subject to quick online judgement, and those with positive rankings are eligible for sharp discounts in a way that makes it almost impossible for the “anti-social” to do much more than survive. There remains the lingering spectre of our modern billionaire elite class, with hints that they didn’t disappear, but instead might be hiding out until the rest of us can fix everything up for them. (Those jerks.)
L.X. Beckett (revealed, on the copyright page, to be a pseudonym for award-winning fantasy author A.M. Dellamonica) seems to suggest a position of caution when it comes to social media (in 2101, everything is connected, and privacy is almost entirely a thing of the past), but she isn’t interested in scolding us for our online obsessions. Rather, our interconnectivity has brought the Doctorow-ian reputation economy to the fore: though a subsistence living is available to everyone in the form of basic shelter and printed protein (the only food remaining), social media determines one’s ability to obtain almost everything else, from luxury real-world items to in-game perks—personality quirks and bad moods are subject to quick online judgement, and those with positive rankings are eligible for sharp discounts in a way that makes it almost impossible for the “anti-social” to do much more than survive. There remains the lingering spectre of our modern billionaire elite class, with hints that they didn’t disappear, but instead might be hiding out until the rest of us can fix everything up for them. (Those jerks.)
Gamechanger is, in many ways, about how we rebuild a world, and the ways in which the more things change, the more they stay the same. For all of its big ideas and smart questions, it also presents us with an imagined landscape that’s a lot of fun to explore, a devastated world as appealing as it is disturbing. It’s a wild read, but also uniquely plausible, a cyberpunk fantasy that reveals itself gradually, getting bigger with each new chapter.