The wealthy have formed their own corporate-sponsored Communities, whereas others are living in primitive outposts, fearing bands of Pirates. Lepucki uses this backdrop to explore how a typical marriage might survive a society that has turned into rather a dog-eat-dog affair. Such fears are in the ether, and California strikes a nerve. We are mid-apocalypse, as if Lepucki is supplying the missing years between now and, say, the desolation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. All the artefacts are familiar, as is the tortured landscape, but none of the known systems are in place – no government to speak of, no infrastructure, no CNN, no internet, no universities. The nearness of this era helps make her vision both more discomfiting and more credible. I n a foreword he added to the second edition of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote: "Whatever its artistic or philosophical qualities, a book about the future can interest us only if its prophecies look as though they might conceivably come true." Edan Lepucki sets her debut novel, California, somewhere in the 2060s.
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