Cliff Brown of Magee has announced the publication of his first novel, The Recovery Act.
The novel is described as “dystopian fiction,” a genre which imagines a world gone badly wrong, usually with a setting in the future. The genre includes such famous novels as 1984 by George Orwell, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and the more recent young adult novel, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
Such novels usually trace an ideology such as socialism, communism or fascism to its logical conclusion in the total breakdown of society.
The Recovery Act opens at a time in the not-too-distant future when the COVID pandemic is over but due to extreme political changes, the world is still living with its effects. Brown images most of the world’s population having been declared “non-essential” and still living in quarantine in government-authorized “habitats,” their every movement monitored by computers.
Socialist propaganda is constantly and directly relayed into their brains through an implant, and everyone is kept alive with “manna” distributed daily through vacuum tubes. Computers have learned to write their own code, declared everyone “nonessential,” and taken over the world.
One man, Dr. Oliver Jones, M. D., has avoided quarantine and begins selecting one person at a time to “wake up” and return to normal human function and self-determination. He selects those he thinks can be instrumental in reviving society. His first success is Clyde Simpson, a former reporter and editor of a local newspaper.
Jones helps Simpson remember the progression of events leading up to quarantine: President Joe Biden has led the United States to join the one-world government, and the pandemic comes along conveniently to cause people to panic and voluntarily give up their freedom to that government.
Together the two men begin the task of trying to awaken others in the area that seems to be Jackson, Mississippi. They also need to find a skilled IT expert who can hack into the world computer system and end its control over human life.
Brown says he got the idea during the 14-day shutdown imposed on his own Magee business, Jade’s Beauty Supplies and Fashions.
He said, “During the third and fourth week of those 14 days, I had a lot of time to think.... I started to wonder what would happen if it never ends. what if everything and everybody was deemed nonessential? What would happen if everyone on Earth ended up either dead or in quarantine and computers kept us fed? Once the world was as bad as I could imagine it, I began to write about recovery from such a world.”
Brown says he is planning a second book and is already working on a retelling of the same story from the viewpoint of a character in the story, Little Jim.
The Recovery Act is available on Amazon or from Cliff Brown’s website, CliffBrownBooks.com.
The 171-page book was self-published by Dorrance Publishing Company.
