January 21, 2025
2 minimum read
Book review: A chillingly nostalgic fictional dystopia
A novel set in a near-future surveillance state depicts the path to liberation.
fiction
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Written by Ali Smith.
Pantheon, 2025 ($28)
In a totalitarian version of Britain, floating somewhere in the contiguous present or near future, people are either unmanned workers or undesirables deemed “unidentified” by vague, gray authorities. this is the background glyph, A new work by award-winning Scottish author Ali Smith.
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The foreground and background are almost indistinguishable here. They pass in and out of each other in this factual, wordplay-loving liberation story full of explained and elaborated terminology, incidental etymology, and puns. Smith’s didacticism is camouflaged in dialogue, a series of clever lessons on the mini-history of words and the mutability of language.
In the foreground, two children tumble down an abandoned waterfall, trying to secure food and find footing in a city where at night a red line can be drawn around where they sleep. I’m having a hard time. They are separated first from the loving whistleblower mother who raised them, then from the man she entrusted to them, and finally from each other mysteriously. Woven into this tapestry are subtle jumbles of xenophobia, capitalism, and soulless technocratic overlords, all of which are deeply relevant to America in 2025. With the specter of mass deportation looming, it’s all too easy to read Smith’s dystopia as a fairly accurate depiction of the times we feel like we’re living in.
But “dystopia” is probably a misnomer. Although Smith’s fictional decoration features many imaginary styles, such as literal lines of red paint and the “super bounder” machines that paint it, the surveillance state it evokes is not an institutionally sanctioned Not far removed from existing forms of observation and repression. Closed-circuit television cameras are ubiquitous in the UK. In the United States, private companies have almost unlimited access to personal data. Across the Global North, migrants and refugees are increasingly being rejected and expelled by hostile governments.
what glyph It suggests that dystopia is no longer a counterfactual. It is now clearly present and pervasive, and it is up to us to shake off the chains.
