Here's a mind game: Imagine a perfect world. In her latest novel, Edith Forbes does just that, extrapolating from the present day to create an earth 877 years in the future, a utopia where crime is a memory, sex is "as wholesome and readily available as a single-serving bag of carrot sticks," and everyone can live on indefinitely.
Sounds dandy, right?
Then again, a central problem with utopias is that one person's paradise is another's purgatory. And the main character of this intriguing novel, Lydian, a "level 2 information analyst," is no longer sure that she agrees with her society's idea of perfection. When she describes the Bay Area, where much of Exit to Reality (Seal Press, 1997; $24) is set, the reader catches the hint of dissatisfaction in her voice:
"I often wondered how those hills had looked before they were reclaimed for agriculture. . . . In the late primitive era, both basin and foothills had been cities, the landscape covered by houses built from wood or stucco or brick. Now all the houses in the region were prefabricated from Flexilicon and embedded in the slopes of the coastal mountains."
Of course, fictional utopias rarely are utopian. After all, it's hard to summon up dramatic tension in a world where everything is perfect. True to form, Forbes, '78, MA '78, envisions 2874 A.D. as an anti-utopia: a world of complete satisfaction and complete abundance, but a world also of empty pleasure and spiritual death. As Lydian notes early on: "Humanity had freed itself from poverty, disease, crime, war, pollution, family dysfunction. . . . So why couldn't I learn to relax and enjoy it?"
Lydian's vague longings and anxiety come into focus when she receives a quirky message on the Random Queries and Idle Speculations computer bulletin board. She replies, and so meets Merle, who doesn't look like any of the genetically standardized men she is used to. In fact, in one of Forbes's amusing touches, Merle resembles the "primitive era" actor Walter Matthau--at least at first.
Forbes's ambitious attempt to write social commentary side by side with a love story does, in some measure, succeed. And when she fails, it's not because of weak writing, but the difficulty of keeping so many literary balls in the air.
Lydian and Merle rendezvous in Paris, where they fall in love (some things don't change). Then it's back to the Bay Area and on to other locales. Travel is easy in the 29th century, especially if you're Merle and have the ability to transport yourself instantly wherever you like. He also possesses the unique power to change shape at will, as well as to summon physical objects out of nowhere. But even as she is learning to do these things herself, Lydian points out that none of it makes sense. Shape-shifting doesn't correspond to the laws of physics, and you can't summon chocolate doughnuts (which they do) out of nowhere. And Merle has no explanation. But the author does, and it's chilling, seamless and intelligent. To explain it, though, would destroy the suspense of the novel, and the revelation is worth the wait.
One problem with Exit to Reality is that Forbes's vision of a hellish utopia is not particularly new. In fact, the book reads like Aldous Huxley's 1932 classic Brave New World filtered through a 1990s Internet-culture lens. Huxley adds the perfect drug ("soma") to his mix, but the outcome is similar. Substitute virtual reality for Huxley's 3-D "feelies," subtract soma, replace Huxley's biting commentary on class with Forbes's less incisive speculation on gender roles, and bingo: You're now in the spiritually parched world of Exit to Reality. But Forbes does not have much to add to Huxley's disturbingly prescient insight that gratification can be a powerful tool of social control, that it can be harder to rebel against pleasure than against oppression. Still, if Forbes is mining this rich vein too, well, our TV-addled age provides plenty of room for more than one novelist's pickax.
The second, more fundamental problem rises out of Forbes's ambitions for this novel. So much of the book is spent establishing the futuristic world that, in the end, the emotional bond between Lydian and Merle is short on emotional complexity and feels forced. Perhaps Forbes's idea is to posit love itself as the real utopia. The reader can only respond to Lydian and Merle's love as Lydian herself initially responds to the world she lives in: too easy; too perfect.
Ray Isle, a 1993-95 Stegner Fellow, is a lecturer in the creative writing program. His stories have appeared in numerous literary journals.
