ONLY NOW WE ARE

In Kato-Wallace’s novel, a group of friends make plans for their own utopian society, only to find it isn’t so perfect.

Laid off at work and losing his girlfriend soon after, The Omicron feels lost and out of place. It’s during this period that he encounters the Mouth, and the two quickly form a bond over their distaste for the current state of the world. The Mouth leads him to meet Squire, Regina, and Hawke, and their little band feels complete. They all have different skills and share the goal of building a perfect society away from the rat race. The Mouth finds them an abandoned manufacturing facility, and together they leave everything but the necessities behind and start to create their own little paradise. Building a sustainable commune from nothing is harder than any of them expected, but they toil on, knowing their growing legions of online followers are ready to take up the cause and join them once it’s complete. With so much pressure on their shoulders, and so much work to be done, tensions start to rise; they’ll soon have to face the reality that perfection isn’t really possible. In ruefully knowing, highly stylized prose, Kato-Wallace cleverly incorporates elements of dystopian fiction into the narrative to demonstrate how the pitfalls of human nature will win out against even the purest of intentions. The text is framed as the Omicron and the Mouth recounting the story of their project’s rise and fall, which gives the story an extra level of depth—it’s almost as if they’re recounting a creation myth to their followers (“maybe the history of this place can be like that coin—a token from a foreign land, useless in every way but with all the trappings of limitless value”). Readers who like a little philosophy with their fiction will eat this one up.

An engaging and thought-provoking cautionary tale.