“A city’s blank white concrete slabs, the giant ones ringed by the less giant, gave space in their midst to a broad pink-floored plaza, a playground in which two hundred young children played and exercised under the care of a dozen supervisors in white coveralls.”
On the one hand, I feel like this novel basically got plagiarized by the early 2000s movie “The Island” which has an almost identical dystopian vision about the world, and a similar plotline. But on the other hand, I swear there’s not a single interesting or original idea in this book. This is an early 1970s dystopian novel by Ira Levin, who wrote The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, and Rosemary’s Baby. The basic setup here is that everyone in “the Family” takes a kind of subduing drug that keeps them docile and compliant. They have scheduled sex once per week, they have a job assigned in adolescence, and they die of old age at 62. The main difference here from other books is that everything is driven by data points collected and calculated by the giant computer at the center of their lives. So it’s a criticism of the growing technocracy and stats-driven view of life. Fine. I imagine he’d be horrified by our current life, but he was an early predictor.
But man, the execution here is awful. In a lot of ways, it’s just a mix of Anthem and Brave New World but a LOT pornier. It’s really odd how much weirdly graphic and gross sex there is in this book, as well as rape that awakens desire (eesh).
