BACKSTAGE

An idealistic academic finds himself gobsmacked by the truth about power in this frightening piece of speculative fiction.

Graduate student Nick loves nothing more than debating the value of the Electoral College with his colleague Sarah. His orderly world gets upended when Claire, a political strategist who graduated from the same university, gives Nick a peek behind the curtain of power. Claire introduces him to Sen. Redd, a longtime corrupt politician who knows where all the bodies are buried. Redd needs an assistant, one whose main duties will be writing Orwellian speeches to distract voters. Nick decides to accept so he can learn about Redd’s organization and bring it down. Sarah fears he’s lost his way, and Nick gets taken to a secret island where politicians and business and military leaders scheme about how to rule America by misleading its gullible citizenry. Redd and tech mogul Eliot Vane spend hours detailing their coalition’s methods, expecting to bring Nick firmly on board. Yet Nick resists, trying without success to weave warnings into the treatises he’s writing, which keep getting flagged by Vane’s algorithms. At last, he creates one more work to alert the world. Author Kushnir certainly draws inspiration from a deeply divided United States. This gloomy novel won’t encourage those depressed by the country’s current state of affairs; Kushnir’s narrative reinforces the worst fears about deep-state conspiracies. The villains of the piece simply practice sleight of hand, as explained by Sen. Redd: “That crap made of slogans about morality, freedom, equality—we scatter it like breadcrumbs to pigeons so they peck and don’t fly too high, don’t see the sky belongs to us, not them?” Unfortunately, the prose abounds with such self-aggrandizing monologues. Also, protagonist Nick is naïve enough to believe he can bring down a system that’s existed for decades all by himself, with just his inspiring words. While Kushnir makes a successful, thought-provoking argument for such a shadow government with the story’s many believable scenarios, this dark vision of democracy won’t resonate with everyone.

A somewhat plausible but bleak work that paints any bright light as an oncoming train.