dystopia

I'm reading the newest contender right now, which is probably why I found myself reflecting this morning that the best dystopian novel among the many I've read over many years has got to be the little-known "In the Heart of the Valley of Love" by Cynthia Kadohata, which is still in print and still selling on Amazon. Two reasons I like it so well: no flying cars, and no androids.

What I had totally forgotten is how long it's been since I read it, when it was first published. Kadohata wrote "Heart of the Valley" nearly 20 years ago to forecast the feel and quality of American life in the middle of the 21st century. It's perfectly set in Los Angeles and the desert communities east of L.A., and portrays a society exactly like the one we're living in now, only more so.

"Before everything ran out of money, back at the beginning of the century, the government had started to build something in Southern California called the Sunshine System," we're told by Francie, the multiracial, multicultural teenage protagonist, "an ambitious series of highways and freeways that would link the whole area and eliminate traffic jams. They never finished the Sunshine, though, and the truncated roads arched over the landscape."

That not only sounds real, it is; I've seen that stump of one freeway overpassing another in Riverside.

If Kadohata's eye for the future is accurate, there will be no revolution, no cleansing reform, no relief from today's subtly repressive, propaganda-driven plutocracy. Corrupt, inept governments and police agencies harass and worry an impoverished and powerless mass of proles, mostly reduced to selling each other black market water, gasoline, cigarettes, and other necessities.

But there's good news. To some extent, people's ordinary, everyday lives go on as they always have. They fall in love, have hopes and aspirations, do what they can to better themselves, and work together in families and groups to enhance survival. They ride bikes and whatever buses are still running, and drive ancient, rusting vans and pickup trucks when they have to haul something and can get the gas. They also have to deal with extremes we don't witness today, but are perfectly feasible assuming there are no changes in the status quo in the near future: for example, an army of hundreds of homeless beggars marching down the middle of the Sunset Strip in broad daylight.

As in places like Nairobi or Mumbai or Tegucigalpa today, most people make most of their livings in an informal, semi-underground economy, as street vendors, black marketeers, delivery servicers, carters, lumpers, drivers, shoeshiners, tour guides, handymen and roustabouts, etc. And everybody buys and sells on the black market.

Francie, whose parents both died of lung cancer when she was 13 because "They'd probably both been exposed to a chemical or something," faces the bleak landscape stoically, enrolls in a community college, has ambitions and an aptitude for writing, and falls in love, like anyone living in any time. But she also finds features of her alien environment deeply disturbing, like the trucks, for even in 2050 the semis are still running.

"Those trucks scared me," she says. "I felt as if everything in the world was falling apart and yet the trucks kept driving. Every time we came out to the desert, there they were."

Cartoon: "Dystopia" by Michael Fitzjames of the Sydney Morning Herald. Click on the image for a larger view.