COMBUSTION

An immoral, shortsighted American president endangers the world in Proctus’ debut political satire.

In the future, the Great Consolidation has left America with only nine major corporations. President Donald McDonald (who ran on the platform “Make America Virile Again”) attempts to keep the public distracted by launching the first manned mission to Mars: “The mission you are about to undertake exemplifies the greatness of America and my leadership,” announces POTUS as the mission takes off. “History will record that it was my persistence that made this mission possible.” Bad things are happening while no one’s paying attention, however. Insurance is growing unaffordable due to increasingly destructive storms, and the country’s lone financial institution has no plan to deal with it. The U.S. Senate majority leader is plotting a sexual assault as part of a plan to keep the Supreme Court from outlawing abortion while the Canadian government is attempting to build a wall along its border with the United States to keep out refugees from an economic crisis. Perhaps most ominously, two scientists—Alexander Clearhead of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Elena McPhee of the Integrated Ocean Observation System—have discovered a distressing change in the levels of phytoplankton in the world’s oceans. Will these two scientists (and lovers) be able to convince the corrupt president to do something before it’s too late? Proctus’ prose is flat and functional, and he doesn’t manage to wring much humor from it; it almost feels as if the jokes were meant to be added later. There are many storylines, each built around its own set of paper-thin characters, but none of them are developed enough to truly captivate the reader. Additionally, the book is surprisingly (and purposelessly) sexually explicit. The plot does successfully build to a grim conclusion. However, it does so without making any sharp or coherent arguments—or making the reader laugh.

A scattershot and ultimately ineffective satire of the Trump administration.