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See You in the Cosmos
Exploring Space: From Galileo to the Mars Rover and Beyond
The Terranauts: A Novel
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Gumnut Babies
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Highly Illogical Behaviour
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75/425 pages
See What I Have Done
The Dog, Ray
Forgetting Foster
The Heart Goes Last
Actual Rating 1.5The Heart Goes Last had some really interesting story elements and plot points going for it.
The main characters, Stan and Charmaine, are living in their car after economic collapse, with the money from Charmaine’s bar job their only form of income. They both used to have steady jobs, a nice home, and a bright future. They wanted to have children some day.
But now they have to pull strings in order to shower, and they only have the money to wash their clothes at a laundromat when they start to get particularly pungent.
Then Charmaine sees the advertisement.
Consilience is a new social experiment which offers stable jobs and a home, so long as they spend every second month in a prison-like environment. Prison-like because all the really criminal elements are quickly weeded out, leaving just the upstanding folk who signed on for this experiment.
Then it occurred to the planners of Positron, he says – and this was brilliant – that if prisons were scaled out and handled rationally, they could be win-win viable economic units. So many jobs could be spawned by them: construction jobs, maintenance jobs, cleaning jobs, guard jobs. Hospital jobs, uniform-sewing jobs, shoemaking jobs, jobs in agriculture, if there was a farm attached: an ever-flowing cornucopia of jobs. Medium-size towns with large penitentiaries could maintain themselves, and the people inside such towns could live in middle-class comfort. And if every citizen were either a guard or a prisoner, the result would be full employment: half would be prisoners, the other half would be engaged in the business of tending the prisoners in some way or other. Or tending those who tended them.
And since it was unrealistic to expect certified criminality from 50 percent of the population, the fair thing would be for everyone to take turns: one month in, one month out. Think of the savings, with every dwelling serving two sets of residents! It was time-share taken to its logical conclusion.
Of course they sign up right away. What could possibly go wrong?
The rest of this review can be found here!