As Tomorrowville by David Isaak opens, it is in fact yesterday. 2008 to be specific. Toby Simmons, a Gen X programmer/engineer/hacker, is in the midst of something professionally fascinating but personally stupid.
Toby uses a state-of-the-art virtual reality system to surreptitiously peek into the apartment of the woman across the street. But he’s three stories up, and loses track of where his real feet are walking as he’s too busy following his virtual eyeballs, leading him to one of Wile E. Coyote’s famous maneuvers. He discovers that there’s nothing underneath him but air and a three-story drop to the pavement.
But just like that cartoon coyote, Toby comes back from the dead. It only takes a silly prank, a forgotten gin and tonic, and 80 years, as medical science makes great strides in bringing cryogenically frozen bodies back from formerly life-ending spinal destruction. Along with a whopping bill from the U.S. government– nearly five million dollars for all the many, many costs of Toby’s revival.
It’s 2088, and Toby Simmons has unwittingly become Rip Van Winkle. The world has changed while he’s been sleeping– although not, perhaps, nearly as much as it should have.
This compelling story follows along with Toby’s learning curve/adaptation to a not-nearly-so-brave new world. The government relies on asset reclamation for funding, and issues mandatory, automatically-dispensed mood enhancements to keep its population from noticing that fewer and fewer people manage to stay out of the prison industrial complex.
The late 21st century that surrounds Toby has idealized the era from which he came to the point that, as much as they want to hear the account of the person who lived it, they are only interested in that account if it reinforces their mythology. At the same time, this new society’s faults are clear to both Toby and the reader– but concerns about safety and security eclipse all other concerns from the powers-that-be, leaving the U.S. a totalitarian regime that has lost ground to the rest of the world and has medicated itself into not caring about all that much.
The world in which Toby has found himself is a dystopia without having ever experienced an apocalypse, made all the more fascinating because they did it to themselves, using tools that they claim the late 20th and early 21st century gave them.
It’s a future that is all too easy to see from here. Toby begins to feel himself superior to those around him, and as he’s not drugged up to his eyeballs, it’s easy for readers to slide into his perspective on this world.
In the end, Toby wants out of 2088, and the story leaves readers with the hope that he might manage to avoid the destination his journey is leading to– prison– by doing something professionally interesting but quite possibly, and quite personally, stupid, once again.
Quantum Consequences, the fifth book in the Physics, Lust, and Greed Series by Mike Murphy, mixes conflicts from the past, present, and future as a group of time travelers clash over the fate of multiple worlds.
The Cygnus Book Awards recognize emerging new talent and outstanding works in the genre of Science Fiction, Steampunk, Alternative History, and Speculative Fiction. The Cygnus Awards is a genre division of Chanticleer International Book Awards and Novel Competitions (The CIBAs).
