This Special Issue is a review of The Logoharp: A Cyborg Novel of China and America in the Year 2121.
Where might our societies be heading? Arielle Emmett’s, The Logoharp: A Cyborg Novel of China and America in the Year 2121, is a looking glass into a future, twenty-second century dystopian possibility.
China, the Mother Country, rules the world. Ameriguo (successor of a collapsed America) is a Chinese colony.
“‘Ameriguo is a little winter paradise, primitive and greedy. Securitized now as a Chinese trading protectorate, addicted to pleasure. Mother country floods…the continent with cast-off consumer goods, contaminated food and transportation materials that disintegrate on contact.’”
The Directorate is an amorphous, omnipresent, and omnipotent organization that controls Mother Country and her domains. Social harmony is the raison d’etre of its leaders. Reverse Journalists support the Directorate by predicting the future using elaborate algorithms and statistics to create, package, and propagate desired outcomes.
Naomi, an Ameriguan, volunteers to become a half Cyborg, elite Reverse Journalist. She is surgically implanted with a Logos-harp, an instrument that supplies her with encyclopedic knowledge and data and the ability to sense emotions and thoughts and communicate across all languages and media.
The plot turns on the Mother Country’s Harmonious Recycling Program (HRP). In the face of a global population of 9,500,000,000 that was strangling the earth, the United Nations decreed that all humans upon reaching the age of 55 must be recycled. This would ensure a balance between global births and deaths.
Frozen Songhua River (www.chinadaily.com.cn)
The HRP has been first enacted in North China within a repurposed Harbin Ice Festival. Elders are placed in cryopods and sent off by worshipping families with ceremonial festivities on the frozen Songhua River. After a drug-induced ten days of dream-bliss, the elders’ bodies are collected from downriver and recycled.
But there appears to be a design flaw in the program. A tiny fraction of the elders are waking and escaping early death, recycling, and the authorities. The government tasks Naomi with identifying the flaw and tracking down who is responsible. Friends and lovers, acquaintances and strangers, the Reverse Journalists themselves, all are potential suspects, real or imagined.
While the hunt proceeds apace, another more existential controversy also rages through the pages. A battle for our souls. A debate among loyalty, independence, and humanity. Dystopian fiction is troubling by design. The reader wants to hope this future does not come to pass. And yet….
Naomi’s drive to be loyal clashes with her residual individuality. She is blunt, questions, and is not afraid to take risks. Emmett evocatively looks to Naomi’s hands and voice to message this internal conflict. Naomi’s sensitive human hand rises and falls in a dance with her brawny prosthetic hand. Her voice (when she can, can’t or must) seesaws between the soft human and the hardened Harp.
I was challenged by some of the concepts of time, travel, and sense of place. I had to look up qubits, codons, and aeolian winds. I rue a future society with no apparently meaningful recognition and appreciation of culture. At the same time, I was readily acquainted with numerous references, both direct and oblique, to historical figures and controversial events in 20th and 21st century China, including the (First) Cultural Revolution, the one-child policy, the Bo Xilai Affair, Uyghur train station attacks, a plague impliedly escaping a laboratory, and Mother Country homage to Great-Great-Grandfather Xi (Jinping).
Emmett’s most biting social critique is not of the bland, authoritarian system that prevails a century from now. Rather, it is reproval of the America of today that let itself go and collapsed to such a system. The siren call of this lament is strong:
Untranslated Chinese at the top of the cover page (see above) reads “America: The Second Edition.”
“‘…the old Ameriguan democracy, which lost itself to Towers of Babble—consumer excess, celebrity worship, bickering, conspirators, rigged elections—.’”
“…I see the weakness in my own perception. I see the flaws in our system and in my birth country, Ameriguo, its selfishness and, weirdly, its willingness to give in.”
Which society will prevail—human with independent dominion or borgian with an overlord that prescribes and proscribes a better life for all? In future hindsight, will this fictional, 22nd century world where harmony is the only end no matter the means have been foreshadowed in part by a 21st century America in which for many, freedom (individualism) is increasingly the only end no matter the means? Is there a middle course, or an off-ramp that might accommodate multiple ends?
The Logoharp is a story of love and horror. It is relatable and disturbing. The grave issues facing us now remain potent then: AI, drugs (fentanyl), and climate catastrophe to name a few. The crusade for the HRP flaw, the demanded prosecution of he/she/them who is/are/may be responsible, relationship impacts, social consequences, these all converge as the novel slides down the ice.
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