Dan Simmons’ Flashback is a very angry book. I’m hard pressed to say whether it’s Simmons letting his anger at current events flood his book or if Simmons was experimenting. It was very hard not to try and psychoanalyze the writer as I read this book. Like China Miéville’s books, Flashback is packed with ideas. But unlike Miéville, it has a sympathetic and human character to anchor the chaos.
Nick Bottom is an unlike hero in a future America that, in my more pessimistic moods, seems all too likely to happen. The economy has collapsed and most people live hand to mouth in former malls and housing projects or are fighting for territory. Many people are hooked on flashback, a drug that lets them relive moments from their memory. Nick used to be a cop until his wife died and his drug abuse got out of control. We meet him several years after that, trying to convince a Japanese advisor to let him investigate the murder of the advisor’s son. Nick even tries to portray his addiction as an asset, since he can remember the case files while he’s under the influence. Simmons lets us sink into Nick’s world, picking up details about our possible future history while slowly building up the mystery plot.
There are two secondary plot threads that help us see just how dangerous the future America has become. In one of them, we meet Nick’s father-in-law, an aging academic who would like to write a Tolstoy-level epic about this new American society. Until the plot really gets moving, however, Leonard mostly seems bewildered. The other plot thread is narrated by Nick’s son, Val, a punk who is angry at the world but is reluctant to lash out against it.
Before long, it becomes clear to Nick that there is more going on to the mystery than he thought. To the reader, it becomes clear that the murder is not the center of this book. This is not a mystery; it’s a conspiracy. Nick travels back and forth from Denver to Boulder to Sante Fe (no longer a part of the United States) to Los Angeles and back. Leonard and Val flee Los Angeles as a war breaks out behind them. The pieces of the puzzle come together in the end, into an unexpected picture. Everything clicks into place in a deliciously satisfying way, in spite of the possibly ambiguous ending. Flashback has an ending that could be read as optimistic or pessimistic, depending on your mood when you read it. This is a tremendous book, and I’m still turning over it’s ideas almost a week after I finished it. This is one of the best dystopias I’ve read in a long time.
So why do I call this an angry book? Because it was all too easy for me to imagine a writer reading or watching the news and getting so angry at politicians and the media and terrorists and society that it had to come out somehow. The America that Simmons presents could not exist without our current society and government making some key mistakes. First, America is so broke that it hires out its army to fight for Japan in China. Second, September 11 is now celebrated as a holiday, rather than a day of mourning. Third, America has ceded its place as a world power and its population seems to have lost any will to regain that place. After all that, it’s easy to picture Simmons as an anti-Islamic conservative or libertarian.
And yet, this book has too much subtlety to dismiss it like that. This book is crammed with ideas, just waiting to spark discussion not only about its literary merits but also about the way our society might be headed. I finished this book right before the debt ceiling talks produced a plan, so it was very easy to think that Simmons’ predicted future was well on its way. This book is terrifying for that very reason.
This book deserves to be read widely, for its plot, its character, and especially for its ideas. I hope it wins a ton of awards so that more people will read it.