January 21, 2025
2 min learn
E-book Evaluate: A Fictional Dystopia That’s Chillingly Acquainted
A novel that takes place in a near-future surveillance state plots a path towards liberation
Fiction
Gliff
by Ali Smith.
Pantheon, 2025 ($28)
In a totalitarian model of Nice Britain, hovering someplace in an adjoining current or close to future, individuals are both employee drones or undesirables deemed “unverified” by a nebulous grey authority. That is the background of Gliff, a brand new novel from award-winning Scottish author Ali Smith.
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Foreground and background are virtually indistinguishable right here. They fade by means of and previous one another on this matter-of-fact, wordplay-loving liberation story, which is stuffed with explicated and dissected phrases, incidental etymologies, and puns. Smith’s didacticism is camouflaged in dialog, a sequence of intelligent classes on the small histories of phrases and the mutability of language.
Within the foreground, two kids tumble by means of a cascade of abandonments, struggling to remain fed and discover their footing in a metropolis the place, in the course of the evening, pink traces could get painted across the place the place they’re sleeping. They get separated first from the loving whistleblower mom who raised them, then from the person to whom she entrusted them, and eventually and mysteriously from one another. Woven into this tapestry in an suave hodgepodge are glancing critiques of xenophobia, capital and soulless technocratic overlords—all keenly related to 2025 America, the place, because the specter of mass deportation looms, it’s all too straightforward to learn Smith’s dystopia as a reasonably correct description of the time we discover ourselves dwelling in.
However “dystopia” might be a misnomer. Smith’s fictional decor options many imagined stylings, such because the literal traces of pink paint and the “Supera Bounder” machines that draw them, however the surveillance state it conjures isn’t far faraway from already present types of institutionally sanctioned observation and oppression. Within the U.Okay., closed-circuit TV cameras are ubiquitous; within the U.S., personal companies have virtually limitless entry to private information; all through the International North, immigrants and refugees are more and more being focused for rejection or expulsion by hostile governments.
What Gliff suggests is that dystopia is not a counterfactual. It’s now manifestly current and far-reaching, and it’s as much as us to forged off our chains.
