2084

In a dystopian America of 2084, a Kansas farm couple searches for their kidnapped children.

The title of this opener in a political/SF trilogy by author Keena begs comparison to George Orwell’s magisterial Nineteen Eighty-Four. As with Orwell’s speculation and dire warnings (sometimes cited), this alternates between narrative and extensive essays and soliloquies. By 2041, the United States has a new Constitution (attacking gun ownership, among other individual liberties) pushing the socialist agenda of a dominant political party that is unnamed, but one could probably guess. By 2053, with a crashed economy resulting in suspension of social services and active extermination of the aged, a second Civil War ignites. Tyrant President Regis, leading a Washington cabal of elites (called, of course, the Elites), violently crushes dissent, but he loses control west of the Mississippi and much of the South to “Outcast” rebels. In largely anarchic Kansas, common-law couple Dark Sun and Dark Moon tries to ride out everything off the grid with their two kids. It’s a shocking turn when Elite commandos raid and destroy their homestead just to abduct their son and daughter, Curious and Cammy. The desperate parents join a ragtag “gypsy” caravan, dodging vicious factions (and racist stereotypes) in the war (barbarous Islamists, vicious Latin drug-cartel “Jackals,” ghoulish organ-transplant thieves) on an improbable rescue mission. Orwell’s style is staid compared with Keena’s regular action-combat sequences, practically spilling off the page in living Breitbart News–like scope. When breaks come for lectures (which are frequent), readers are treated to you-won’t-hear-this-uttered-on-college-campuses editorials against the nanny-state authoritarian brand of liberalism and the tools of power it exploited (global-warming phantasms, victim complexes, entitlement mindsets) to tear down the USA. It is a little daffy to be informed early that real villains behind the scenes are a secret society (so secret they created myths of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Bilderbergs to throw off suspicion) that has controlled Earth for centuries, fearing only the wisdom of the Founding Fathers as a threat to their oligarchy. Late in the material—which indeed maintains a suspenseful momentum despite the sermons—a new “Declaration of Free Interdependence” is detailed as a suitable ideological weapon against big-government evil.

Well-constructed, clever libertarian/conservative dystopian SF action; fun despite the harangues.