"This Perfect Day" by Ira Levin

[Decker]

Author of among others Rosemary's Baby. It's a Brave New World clone but with lots more action. Just listened to an audio version and thought it quite a good yarn. Anyone else know the book?

 

[rai]

I will have to check this one out.

 

[dask]

Stephen King raved about it in DANSE MACABRE, so I picked up a copy. Haven't read it yet but hope to soon.

 

[Dave]

In another thread someone warned against this (I can't find thread) but I read it anyway. I thought it was well written and surprisingly not as out of date, technologically speaking, as I expected. I think that might be because the technology was described but not explained. The clocking in/out armbands would be obsolete of course, a chip under the skin and cell-phone technology and no one could ever escape Uni.

It is an updating of Brave New World obviously, but with 1984 or We thrown in, along with A Clockwork Orange for good measure. However, it is more of a thriller than any of those, albeit with a disappointing ending for me.

Spoiler: Spoilers for ending

The escapees being bought off as programmers didn't quite ring true for me. I can't believe that Chip is the first person who ever had principles that went beyond pure self-interest. All of them must have expected to have returned after missions and left loved ones behind. I also wanted to know the answers to the final questions, but instead only got a weather forecast.

Written in 1970, the ideas about tranquilizers and hormones and controlling humans chemically was very much the vogue. That seems less likely today, although this book must be a Scientologist's nightmare. Uni is a computerised Big Brother, and that idea of us being controlled by an AI was also very much in vogue at that time. The foreword of my copy makes a comparison with the film Equilibrium and says that if it were not so old, and Ira Levin not dead, then that film might be accused of plagiarism, it being so close.