Book Review: Flashback by Dan Simmons
Flashback by Dan Simmons. © 2011 Little, Brown & Company. ISBN 9780316006965. Hardback. Science Fiction / Dystopian / Noir. 550 pages. Source: ARC provided by the publishers.
Synopsis: The near future. The United States isn’t so much. There are forty-four states remaining and that number is tenuous. The country is in economic collapse. And a good portion of the population is addicted to a drug called Flashback. With the world in such chaos, who would want to live in it when it’s possible to relive the earlier, better times? You can be with your loved ones who have died, you can once again experience the life that was before The Day It All Hit The Fan. Or, in the case of the flash gangs who run rampant, you can relive the crimes you commit, getting that “rush” without the risk. (Though really there is no risk for the flash gangs because law enforcement is so overrun that frankly the gangs are not a priority.)
It’s in this world that Nick Bottom lives. He didn’t always. He remembers a time before entitlement programs and other outrageous government spending bankrupted his country. A time when serving on the Denver police force meant something. A time when his wife was alive and his son lived with him. And it’s in this life he chooses to exist. Fired from the Denver PD because of his addiction, Nick doesn’t care about much except how to get the money for his next vial of Flashback. So he’s a bit confused when he’s hired to find the killer of Keigo Nakamura, son of the Japanese adviser to Denver. He’s especially confused because the murder happened six years earlier, back when he was a cop, and he was one of the cops on the case. Confused because not only did the case go cold, but because every high-ranking government agency had been called in to find the killer and none were successful. So why in the world would a former cop, current detective, and flashback addict be asked to solve a seemingly impossible case?
Review: Flashback was a difficult novel for me in some ways. The dystopian future is terrifying both because it seemed so real, seemed as if it could easily happen, and also because it was caused by political ideas I strongly believe in. I know the politics have thrown some people off. But there’s a very important thing to remember here: this is fiction. The world represented does not necessarily reflect what the author believes and I think a lot of readers have forgotten that.
Another extremely important fact to remember: Nick Bottom. The name is not accidental. Bottom is a character in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play about fairies, enchantment, what is real and what is not. In the play, Bottom is put under a spell and wakes up with a donkey’s head. He becomes an ass, if you will. Which is what our Nick Bottom certainly is when we meet him. Caught between waking and dreaming, in the no-time of flashback use, as if he’s under a spell. He can’t even remember to call his son for his sixteenth birthday. Yep, an ass.
But Nick’s addiction to flashback helps in his investigation. In order to relive the parts of your previous life you want to, you have to become skilled in directing yourself back to those parts or you may end up reliving something like, oh, a root canal. And there’s also the fact that Keigo Nakamura was working on a documentary about flashback in America when he was killed. Nick’s state is important, though perhaps not in the way his employer expected.
It’s a very gritty futuristic dystopian noir. I’m not sure I’d ever thought to see those words together to describe a book. And like all Simmons’s work, the characters are great and the world fully formed, which is one of the things that made it so terrifying to me and so difficult to get through at times.
It is, however, worth reading. And when it gets to be a little too much, just remember these lines from another character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “If we shadows have offended/Think but this, and all is mended–/That you have but slumbered here/While these visions did appear.”
