Being a few days away from 2010 feels all sorts of mixed up.  Our dreams of the future from twenty years ago just seem really silly now, even as I think many of us are actually pretty disappointed (if not because we don’t have robot housecleaners than because we still – unbelievably – haven’t prioritized finding and implementing solutions to things like poverty and climate change).  And yet, this ever-increasing digital world we are living in feels pretty dang amazing. So, at the end of this year, I’m thinking a lot about past-future hopes, present disappointments, and the magic of my lived reality.

Compounding all of this is a general feeling of elation that we’re leaving behind the aughts, or the zips, or the zeroes, or whatever we want to call this last decade.  Yes, I know that the new decade won’t officially start until 2011.  But I don’t really want to slog through another year of the 2000s.  Most people I know don’t really want to, either.   (Some of my friends have, in fact, declared the 2000s The Worst Decade Ever, although I don’t feel entitled to make that judgement.)  The catalog of horrors feels almost endless: Bush, 9-11, evangelicalism, torture, class divisions, the worsening state of public education, wars on two fronts, the swelling of the prison population, natural disasters exacerbated by climate issues… Blarg, blarg, blarg, and BLARG.  When I stood on the National Mall and watched Barack Obama deliver his inaugural speech at the beginning of this year, I experienced as much relief as I did hope.  Finally, it seemed, someone had the courage to tell us that there are no good and fast answers to our problems, but that it is our job to undertake the difficult task of making meaningful change, anyway.  That commitment is what really gives me hope, after all.

So as much as I don’t have dreams anymore about my life on Saturn (yes, it has rings, so it MUST be the best planet), I also don’t have any illusions that life in this new decade will be that much easier or better.  As Buckaroo Banzai, that pivotal figure from the world of early 1980s cult sci-fi said, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

So here we are.  And it feels good to hit the reset button (even symbolically) and start a new decade (even if it’s not really) and get started with the hard work of reinventing our present and re-imagining our future.  I’m elated about this!  And I hope you are, too.  So let’s make and achieve some big goals, and let’s do some real good in the universe.

Happy New Year, readers and friends!

The Book: Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Economic Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery (2008)

The Goods: Liberation is speculative fiction that contemplates the aftermath of a complete American economic collapse. (Mind you, this novel was published before – and anticipated some of – the recession we actually saw this past year: creepy.) It’s a dystopian – but amazingly hopeful – vision of America where the institution of slavery has been re-established, starving communities struggle to rebuild, the New Sioux roam the plains, and New York is ruled by a villain named the Aardvark. It’s also a rousing adventure, and the action revolves around a gang of supercriminals called the Slick Six, who reunite to restore law and order. (Genre/Pynchon fans: If that doesn’t sound rad, I really don’t know how you define radness.)

The Report: This is the second time I’ve read Liberation (I interviewed the author earlier this year) and I was excited and a little nervous to discuss it with other readers, many of whom have much less of a predilection for sci-fi/pulp than I do. So I’m glad to report that book club was pretty enthusiastic about Liberation! It’s an ambitious novel – balancing a very thoughtful, smart consideration of the collapse of the USA with an entertaining heist plot (the supercrime, as one reader noted, essentially ends up being getting a check written) – and everyone was duly impressed at how well Slattery manages to pull it off.

Thoughts from the collective book club brain:

Slattery’s representation of slavery. In Liberation, the re-emergence of slavery is a very contemporary version of indentured servitude/forced labor, rather than that of the “peculiar institution” of 18th and 19th century slavery in America. This felt unexpected for some readers because Slattery is so effective at illustrating how the unfinished business of the Civil War continues to haunt us to this day. It’s a rather chilling proposition to think of people of means selling themselves into slavery because they suddenly find themselves with no resources and nowhere to go. As one reader commented, when two of the novel’s protagonists sell themselves into slavery in the strawberry fields of California, they’re living the worst imaginable migrant labor experience. It’s terribly moving.

This is not apocalypse porn. We seem to be inundated with books and movies obsessed with the end of the world, and many of them are highly invested in the spectacle of the apocalypse. Liberation stands out as a novel less interested in exploiting the pain of catastrophe than contemplating how communities rebuild. We spent a good bit of time discussing this point, and also about how we take for granted that America, as we know it, will continue in something approximating perpetuity. Slattery is particularly adept at cutting right to the heart of this assumption, illustrating that this grand project of the American union is no less subject to the same forces that have taken down other empires in the past. What Slattery does so well is avoid so much narrative hand-wringing about that and instead gets to the business of imagining (and I do mean ‘imagining’) some rebuilding.

The Aardvark. We loved this bad guy. (Ehren particularly loved him, thanks to his theory that he’s a nod to The Mule of Asimov’s Foundation series.) We loved how Slattery suggested that his rise to power made him more superbureacrat than supercriminal, and he ends up  increasingly concerned with governing (albeit, tyrannically) than criminaling. (“He’s like Giuliani!”)

Librarians will thrive after the apocalypse. Along with the party-loving inhabitants of Las Vegas (a nice nod to the tribes of Burning Man), the librarians of the New York Public Library find that the apocalypse gives them what they always wanted: the perfect, cloistered relationship with their books. That the public library continued to function was among our favorite details of the book.

Also awesome: the really reasoned and compassionate treatment of Marco-as-child-soldier-and-assassin; the heartbreaking relationships between the Slick Six; the Assassin; Maggot Boy Johnson (we wanted more of him!); Asheville as the last free state; the way music and other cultural products become central to the way people re-defined themselves in the wake of national collapse; and the gelato served by our book club host.

Less-than-thrilled about: Some concerns about The New Sioux and connotations about cultural essentialism; Maggot Boy Johnson (we wanted more of him!); the way the novel seemed to lose some narrative momentum by the end; and Tyrone Fly (his appearances didn’t quite work for some of us).

Fine Linkage: A number neat-o items/oddities reminded book club readers of Liberation, or vice versa, during this month of reading. Here are a few:

• ‘Recession Armada’ Of Empty Freighters Floats Off Asian Coast
• The Take (Documentary)
• Swimming Cities of Serenissima

Next month: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote!