3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS
Written in Ink. A dystopian sci-fi satire, bold and imaginative. About… let’s say, intimacy and censorship. (This review’s gonna be a bit vague on detail, sorry! digital footprints, search bots, AI bots, etc). I think back to things I’ve heard people say about A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, about how that novel created a horrifying dystopian future extrapolated from current political tensions and winds. The magnifying effect of this also works similarly, as an effective commentary, though with a more absurd satirical hand.
A strong basic barometer for IF is if I felt really engaged to keep on reading or playing it, and this has that, I really wanted to see what came next at every point! There’s thoughts and ideas bursting out of every passage.
On a very high level, I felt like this spends slightly too much of its brief time on world-building and expositing specifics over situating its characters within that world. The 1st act sets both the world and your relation to it really well. The 2nd chapter with a character named Ollie seemed like it might be getting into commentary about the relationship between emotional and physical intimacy but never entirely gets there.
The 3rd act, I was confused through much of the meeting with the PM and what exactly their proposal was that wouldn’t match what the revolution wanted; it was made clearer at the end (expression) but I couldn’t fully track the characters doubts with what the PM was saying through most of it. Also I did start thinking about why the political structure of the far future seemed so close to our own (and the exact same types of clothing attract the same effects as today? Clothing, desires haven’t changed at all, even though the nature of desire has changed so much? Quibbles, quibbles; honestly the 3XXX in the title is probably making me think about how little time it takes to change culture; if it was “2XXX” I wouldn’t think about it). The PM also just sounds eerily TOO reasonable to me. Like, all three of the characters in the meeting seem to think that the PM proposal is a small step, but it seems from everything I saw before that that it wouldn’t just be controversial, it seems like it’d be fully blasphemous in a world of such strict indoctrination.
But then realism and even neatly structured logic isn’t really what’s vital so much as the overall sentiment being driven forth in this, unbridled and roaming.
There’s also something to be said about the epilogue. Which breaks another wall down, between the author and the work. Between the author and the reader. This is also an intimacy, and vulnerability, and being human with one another. It’s something to hold onto.