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“Like any responsible father, Hugh Morrison had installed cameras in every room in the flat.”
Given the current state of the world where sexism seems at an all time high, wars are still fought repeatedly, people are being sentenced to death for the simple act of loving “the wrong person”, and in Europe, most countries have politically taken a big swing to the right, dystopian fiction has become something that it didn’t seem worth reading. I always wanted to write a dystopian novel but, since we’re now apparently living in one, what’s the fucking point? Anyway, I put aside those feelings for long enough to read Intrusion, and I’m pretty glad I did.
Intrusion is set in the near future (how near is discussed below) and is the story of Hope and Hugh Morrison, an ordinary London couple in many respects. However, in this future, there is a pill women take while pregnant called the Fix, which will strengthen the genome of their children and provide them with immunity to most diseases. Hope doesn’t want to take the pill – her first son Nick doesn’t seem to have been held back too much without it – but there is enormous pressure on her to do it anyway.
The Fix is not compulsory, but the winds are changing and it could be seen by some as child abuse to not give your unborn child a headstart in life. Some people can refuse it for religious reasons (although most of the major religions have no problem with it) but Hope won’t give her reasons and refuses to lie – she just doesn’t want it. This decision begins to divide her family and friends, and soon she, Hugh and Nick are all in terrible danger.
Alongside her story, we have her husband Hugh who has frequent hallucinations, people walking through his life that no one else can see, and a social scientist Geena, who thinks she may have found a reason to make sure Hope doesn’t have to take the Fix after all. When the government gets involved, the Morrisons have little choice but to start running, but in this future where everyone is tracked and watched at all times, that’s far easier said than done.
The most important and interesting question about anything set in the future is the simple, “So what is the world like now?” In this future, all information is conveyed via mobile phones or glasses (like Google glasses), hard copy books are a status symbol, rather than anything people actually read, the world seems at war with India and Russia, the Labour party is in power, vehicles are mostly silent and usually self-driving, there’s snow in summer, and science has made a breakthrough that has allowed for synthetic carbon, meaning that oil and diamonds are plentiful (diamond has replaced glass as the choice material for windows and the like), and even the trees are synthetic.
All of this in turn brings about the question, “When is this set?” No specific dates are ever given, but I would suggest we’re somewhere between 2060 and 2100. It’s very hard to say. Technology is very advanced (the glasses Hope wears tag everyone and every building she passes, display flight numbers next to aeroplanes and record everything the wearer sees) but it is all technology that is currently in production. None of the characters seem surprised by it, suggesting that it’s been commonplace since they were born. In fact, it’s mentioned that some people have traded in their glasses for contacts that do the same thing.
It’s a terrifying future for women, in this world, too. Legislation and laws have changed to make it a crime for any pregnant woman to smoke or drink, and all women of child-bearing age wear a monitor ring on their wedding finger that tracks their environment and lets health experts know if they are in dangerous environments. These laws have since expanded and now women are mostly forced back into positions of homemaker, most workplaces having been declared too dangerous for them, what with second hand smoke and easy access to coffee. This future is a very bad time to be a woman.
I liked Hope, and I liked Hugh, and for the most part the story trundles along quite nicely, shades of 1984 about it, as can only be expected in a world where cameras line the walls of your home. Towards the end, however, MacLeod seems to run out of steam and the whole thing ends with a rather disappointing deus ex machina. The story would be interesting enough, however, without Hugh’s hallucination issue as well, as it turns out he might actually be seeing the future due to a glitch in his genome. It adds a touch of fantasy to an otherwise realistic world, but I don’t know if it was strictly necessary. It seems strange somehow, although it does allow MacLeod to explore a new line of questioning against the Fix.
The best thing about the book, though, is probably just how worryingly realistic it all is. This is a future that, if we don’t pay attention now and make the wrong move in the next few years, may well come to pass. The best dystopias are ones in which we see something that is likely, rather than something far removed from us. This could be sixty years away, but it could be six. And it doesn’t look pretty.
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
