By Steve Gaalema and Michael Grossberg
Oh, what a brave new world Danny King charts in Cancelled – now a Best Novel finalist.
Framed initially as a visionary utopia that fully embraces love, inclusion, social justice, and a triumphant institutionalization of progressive-left politics maybe not that far beyond current norms, this New Britannia initially might seem appealing.
Yet, cracks inevitably appear in the facade, as hidden realities are revealed in this gripping SF-enhanced dystopian fable, one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
A GOOD STORYTELLER WITH A SENSE OF DRAMA AND WIT
An award-winning British novelist (The Burglar Diaries) and award winning film/TV screenwriter (Wild Bill, Eat Local and the BBC sitcom Thieves Like Us), King has learned how to tell a story blending intense drama and dark humor.
Cancelled is subtitled The Shape of Things to Come, referencing British SF writer H.G. Well’s 1933 novel foretelling a “history of the future.” King’s novel feels similarly prescient in its extrapolations of one possible future inspired by today’s illiberal sociopolitical trends.
Often disturbing but also satirically amusing in parts, King’s carefully plotted novel offers urgent warnings about what might happen if government paternalism, radical egalitarianism, progressivist collectivism, identity politics and moral self-righteousness are taken to even more authoritarian extremes.
King envisions a New Britannia in which a glorified woman ruler amasses nearly unlimited power in the name of women and minorities and a cult-like pseudo-religion. Under her authority and virtue-signaling propaganda, everything has been politicized, with new forms of class-based privilege solidified.
The country’s omnipresent and nearly omnipotent State criminalizes all dissent and disapproved behavior, echoing the oppressive attitudes of other dystopias in which “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” (That brilliantly paradoxical summation of the essence of totalitarian ideology was popularized in both T.H. White’s 1940 Arthurian novel The Once and Future King and Robert Heinlein’s 1940 story “Coventry,” later inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame).
Much of the behavior and attitudes commonly accepted in previous eras is now verboten – including in such personal areas as sex, food, manners and language.
King seems to suggest that significant aspects of Britannia’s distorted values, repression and propaganda reflect a warped society that is itself sick, or at least mentally deranged by its suffocating denial of reality and our common humanity.
A CULTURE OF CANCELLATION
While King reveals telling details that spark humor in their satirical absurdities, his deeper theme is sobering indeed.
Anyone and everyone can be canceled, if they don’t conform and obey.
Some citizens, even with relatively higher status and good jobs, are put on probation or demoted.
Some lose their jobs and homes, ending up on the scrabbling, starving fringes of society. Worst of all, some disappear, presumably sent to rumored distant mining or work camps.
Horrifyingly, for those who respect the traditional rules, norms and due process of individual justice, Britannia prosecutes and persecutes many people who had the bad luck simply to be born into the wrong family.
Rejecting individual responsibility for a collectivist and primitivist social justice verging on eugenics, the State crucifies entire generations for the unenlightened attitudes and practices of their ancestors.
On the broad spectrum of bad behavior: using forbidden words and phrases; producing or consuming meat; and expressing romantic or sexual interest in anyone without previously obtaining the mandatory legal documents and enough signed witnesses to proceed.
THE PATH OF A TRUE BELIEVER
King is especially deft at exploring the fraught intersections of the political and the personal.
At the center of the cautionary tale is Sienna Clay, relatively comfortable in her secretive job and gung-ho to enforce the mores and bans of the new regime.
A lesbian in an anxious relationship with her live-in girlfriend, Sienna works as a bureaucratic apparatchik eager to be recognized and promoted for her efforts enforcing Brittania’s orthodoxy.
As an auditor for a leading cancellation company, Sienna invests her time searching for problematic views and hidden offenders. She often finds them, even taking her work home with her to identify and remove more bad apples.
She’s convinced of her high-status mission amidst doubts and lingering insecurities stemming from her troubled childhood and fragile progress towards adulthood. Earnest in her desire to be virtuous, Sienna doesn’t question the good intentions and essential rightness of the system she enforces. Like other true believers, she embraces the ideology celebrating New Britannia as an oasis of tolerance in a world filled with hate.
An embodiment of the personality described so pithily by Eric Hoffer in his classic book The True Believer, Sienna is full of zealous certainty about her mission – at least at first. Social pressures to conform, as well as her inner rationalizations, tend to mask her insecurities and doubts, even from herself as she struggles to preserve her relationships and shaky status at work and at home.
Everything in Cancelled is seen through Sienna’s point of view and initially naive perspective, as the novel’s sole narrator. Even so and early on, observant readers may get an uneasy sense that ultimately Sienna will get a taste of what she’s been dishing out.
COMPELLING CHARACTERS
King has a knack for believable characterization.
Just as the behavior and attitudes of others ring true, Sienna becomes recognizably human in her aspirations and concerns, both at home and at work.
Wrestling with body shame issues, Sienna is uneasy about her girlfriend’s alliance with naturalists and public nudity and uncomfortable as she’s cajoled into no longer wearing clothes.
Meanwhile, Sienna faces upsetting situations at her job. Her boss, who she suspects went “trans” to advance his career and avoid cancellation, doesn’t appreciate her track record of successful cases.
She also is reluctant to acquiesce to co-workers, eager for her to sign and witness their sexual-consent application – legally required before proceeding with a sexual or romantic relationship, or even with an easily misconstrued conversation or initial flirtation.
Such tensions amplify the compelling character arc King charts from naive innocence to eye-opening experience and later, a grim comeuppance.
With its hints of trauma and mental illness, Sienna’s back story helps explain the ways she placates her controlling girlfriend and has difficulty challenging even her preachy home AI. Her abusive childhood seems to make current abuses passively tolerable – at least, until they escalate.
Once an unreflective perpetrator of cancellation but now having more qualms about her work and life, Sienna fitfully matures. Under duress, she develops more independent judgment and self-reliance. Her painful eventual disillusionment, while coming at great cost, allows her to finally grasp the harsher realities of her world.
Ultimately if belatedly, Sienna is a character who truly grows – and grows on the reader.
In its overall structure, and well before its revelatory final twists, King’s novel achieves an epic scope that exposes every corner of his dystopian world, including its deadly worst.
PERSUASIVE WORLD-BUILDING
King’s talent for persuasive world-building is employed to good effect, too.
He adds credible SF elements that make his imaginatively detailed future even more chilling in its Orwellian surveillance.
Even the home Sienna shares with her lesbian lover isn’t really her own domain, dominated as it is by a home AI entity that’s annoying nosy and petulant. She learns not to argue with it, but sucks up to it, just like anyone in a toxic co-dependent relationship.
Whenever Sienna gives in to illicit urges to smoke, eat unhealthy food or engage in other disapproved behavior, her AI notices and gets snippy. Given the expansive powers of her home AI, she rightfully fears punishment, up to the possibility of being locked out of her own home.
That goes well beyond today’s smart homes and Alexa responses. Big Brother is no longer just Watching You; it’s also Cajoling and Controlling You. Here King foresees the coercive downside of Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s trendy book advocating a nominally gentle form of government paternalism allegedly compatible with free societies.
Other futuristic technology is later revealed to be deadly, in the service of expediting suicide on a massive scale surpassing anything envisioned by today’s advocates of legalizing euthanasia. Of special concern to libertarians, such high-tech innovations, and how they’re used by authorities, raise serious questions about the proper boundaries between consent and coercion.
A POWERFUL DYSTOPIA
Well-written and well-plotted, with the story building steam especially in its last half, Cancelled nevertheless takes time establishing its seeming utopia before probing the darker precincts of New Britannia. Without giving too much away, the novel poignantly evokes our world’s tragic history of witch hunts, show trials, imprisoned-labor camps and worse.
Rather than being just a YABD (Yet Another Boring Dystopia), Cancelled builds in drama, depth and insight into a compelling dystopian SF novel with genuine cautionary power, suspense, tragic dimensions and gasp-inducing twists.
When tyranny replaces what Adam Smith defined in The Wealth of Nations as “the simple system of natural liberty” to such an extent, the damage to the fabric of society and to the human capacity for empathy can be devastating. For some, such warping of human connections by the State as God can undermine sanity itself, including the will to live.
Like Lionel Shriver’s Mania – also a 2024 Best Novel nominee and perhaps not coincidentally also by an author who’s lived for years in Great Britain – Cancelled offers an inventive extrapolation of authoritarian trends worldwide but notable in the United Kingdom.
While the rights of consenting adults is a core value of any legitimate variant of liberalism, especially libertarianism, King foresees the horrific consequences when the principles of consent are twisted and inverted.
The dystopia in Canceled incorporates fresh dimensions evoking both the “hard” tyranny that Orwell warned us about in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a Prometheus Hall of Fame inductee, and the insidious “soft” tyranny that Orwell’s friend Aldous Huxley warned about more subtly in Brave New World.
Both types of tyranny remain of concern, but as King shows in Cancelled, the latter can be more insidious and thereby harder to resist.
Overall, Cancelled brings to mind what Ayn Rand wrote in The Romantic Manifesto about reading the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and his other classic novels about nihilism, murderous idealism and the more destructive depths of human motivations and rationalizations, Rand said, was like “entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide.”
Evil is never easy to look at or see clearly. Yet, King is a reliable guide in Cancelled, a brave new tale about the extremes of politicized culture.
It’s also an impassioned plea for liberty – and a return to sanity.
* Read the Prometheus Blog reviews of other current Best Novel nominees, including Michael Flynn’s In the Belly of the Whale, Stuart Turton’s The Last Murder at the End of the World, Wil McCarthy’s Beggar’s Sky and Lionel Shriver’s Mania.
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