Vigilance

by Robert Jackson Bennett

Overview

A dark science fiction action parable about an America that has permanently surrendered to gun violence from a award-winning author.

The United States. 2030. John McDean executive produces Vigilance, a reality game show designed to make sure American citizens stay alert to foreign and domestic threats. Shooters are introduced into a "game environment," and the survivors get a cash prize.

The TV audience is not the only one that's watching though, and McDean soon finds out what it's like to be on the other side of the camera.

"Bursting with sharp insights and savage anger, Vigilance is disturbing and in no way palliative. It's also grimly clever, searingly relevant, and maybe even necessary. And it's not something you'll forget anytime soon." —NPR

"Vigilance is less a story than an intensely distilled mood, an atmosphere wrought out of the US's worst instincts and dystopian obsessions, like Stephen King's The Running Man, but with its gamified violence updated for the 21st century and made totalizing, all-consuming, and entirely manipulated to deliver sales from advertising. Forget The Hunger Games: Vigilance doesn't think half so small." —Locus

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250209436
Publisher:	Tordotcom
Publication date:	08/06/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	194
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

ROBERT JACKSON BENNETT is a two-time award winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, an Edgar Award winner for Best Paperback Original, and is also the 2010 recipient of the Sydney J Bounds Award for Best Newcomer, and a Philip K Dick Award Citation of Excellence. City of Stairs was shortlisted for the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award. City of Blades was a finalist for the 2015 World Fantasy, Locus, and British Fantasy Awards. The Divine Cities trilogy was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Series. His new series begins with Foundryside. Robert lives in Austin with his wife and large sons.

Editorial Reviews

2018-11-12

Americans' addictions to guns, sports, and TV converge in a grim near future in this darkly satirical novel.

Having completed his extraplanetary Divine Cities trilogy, Bennett (Foundryside, 2018, etc.) steers into territory that's more Stephen King than Isaac Asimov. The year is 2030, and John McDean is making ratings gold of a reality TV show in which shooters wreak havoc on civilian populations, with the survivors—never many—winning fat purses. McDean, cynical, is just right for the job as executive producer; no one is safe as long as the money flows. Told that shooting up a skating rink isn't making the numbers, McDean growls, "I thought it was middle school game night!" And never mind the shopping mall, which has been done again and again. McDean is constantly on the search for the Platonic viewer, the Ideal Person, the John Waynes of the world who turn out to be "a far cry from what service has been for two decades now, all technicians huddled around tiny glowing screens as they pilot incomprehensibly lethal robots through the stratosphere." The ordinary Joes and Janes who make up the audience for Vigilance are scared to death, armed to the teeth, jumpy and jittery, and ready to accept the show's promise that mayhem is about to descend upon them at any moment. So it does, to the disgust of Delyna, who works in a gritty urban bar and is about the only character in the story who recoils whenever the show is on. As a result, she's about the only one with a level head, which comes in handy when, as McDean learns, the whole show turns out to be a nicely calculated way to bring a divided, stupid, retrogressive America to its knees without any outsider's ever having to fire a shot. The satire is barn-door broad, the shots scattered, but Bennett has the trend lines just right, and even if his targets are sometimes too obvious, he can write up a storm.

Turn off the tube and read a book—this book in particular, which promises trouble if you don't.

Kirkus Reviews