I’d heard of Claire Wolfe before my friend Jorge lent me her latest book (which is also her first fiction book, it seems). I knew she was a libertarian author, and it was on her site that I first saw the V for Vendetta poster, but other than that I was a complete novice.
Interestingly, the last book I read before Out of the Gray Zone was Paul Freiberger and Michael Swayne’s Fire in the Valley, about the creation of the personal computer. The authors make a point several times: during the computer revolution, what really mattered for software developers was not how much of the installed base they could convert, but what a percentage of newly bought machines they were able to get.
Wolfe seems to be going for the same approach: forget about people who are mostly set in their ways, and try to get them in that silly putty stage that adolescence is. While I didn’t find it stated anywhere, the book seems clearly oriented towards the teen market (they call it “young adultâ€? now, right?). This weighs heavily on both the book’ style and Jeremy’s concerns, and while that made it at first a hard sell for me, once I just accepted that as her target market I had a much easier time letting go. There was an “Oh, come on!â€? moment, but I’ll let you find that out for yourself.
But you aren’t reading this to hear my complains on how U.S. adolescents might view the world, nor if I think they’ll even swallow that ending and not see through the obvious manipulation.
What can I say about its vision of the future? A few days before I read the book I sent a friend the news item about spy drones flying over L.A. in the name of security. Part of his his reaction was “well, as long as they guarantee me that I won’t get killed by someone trying to steal my car, fineâ€?. With so many people on the wrong end of Ben Franklin’s line about liberty and security, it’s all too depressingly possible that the future Wolfe portrays will soon come true. With more people willing every day to abdicate responsability for their actions, eager to just shift blame and play the profit-from-other-people lottery, the only barrier I can see to this future is a technological one - and we all know how long those last.
Something Wolfe does right is portray the degree of apathy and greed inherent in the society which allowed this future to come about: Jeremy’s mother, hoping she gets a cut of the “proceedsâ€?, the freelance abortion police, Jeremy’s own moment when he considers selling out El Rey for a percentage of his wealth. People who are not wholly corrupt masterminds out to control society, and who may see what they do as a way to make a living - the people they’re profiting from are criminals, anyway - are precisely what enables the Evil Bastards to control their future.
I do wish she had gone deeper into how things came to be, because while the book does take care to elaborate on Jeremy’s rationale, it isn’t clear how things got that geseki-chingafied from anything but Fish’s drug-addled rants. If it did, those kids that the book is aiming for might be able to see things coming, as opposed to just know what to expect once they’re here.
In the final tally, the book is far from perfect but extremely readable and has a message more people - specially young people - should hear. You can even read the first four chapters online. Take it out for a spin, you might like it out of the gray zone.