AGENDA 2060

A debut SF satire targets runaway political correctness.

Fabler’s novel opens in 2056 in a world where the fad of social media “woke” posturing and censorship has metamorphosed into a strict political order. Jordan McPhee, “once a mathematics professor, father, and sometime lover of women, apolitical and ambitious only for a life of modern academic achievement,” has been “deplatformed” by the cancel-culture mob that objected to his profession. This has cost him almost everything in this post-Overthrow world where Social Equity Regulations govern all. When he attends the Lineal Progression, formerly known as a christening, of his daughter Lexie’s child, he’s afraid even to hug her (“Accusation was guilt; every middle-aged white male knew that,” he thinks. “Comforting a child—even a grown-up one—was an exclusively female privilege, and the wisdom of that stricture was no longer questioned”). At the ceremony, he meets Alexa Smythe, formerly a brilliant master's degree student in his department. Later, the public inciter Artie Sharp helps to create a viral video that instantly makes Alexa an unwilling emblem of resistance to the Social Justice agenda of the World Government. The author wades into all of this with gusto and a good deal of sharp-tongued eloquence. When Alexa tells a pal that all she was trying to do was get people to be kind to one another, the friend responds: “Good luck with that one. You know what Nietzsche says about kindness, and Foucault has completely deconstructed it.” Like all first-rate satire, this book lets most of its subjects’ own real-world excesses do the heavy lifting. Fabler’s scorn is exquisitely controlled, and a great many of his jokes land. All but the most hypercensorious readers who spend far too much time online will find the results hilarious.

A laser-focused, irresistible lampoon of woke culture.