Virtual unreality
A family deals with the results of feeding society’s addiction to technology and social media
There’s a lot going on in Sean Gandert’s newly published futuristic novel, “Lost in Arcadia.” Society suffers an addiction to a social media platform and a virtual reality interface. The platform and the interface carry the name of Arcadia.
The book also paints a picture of a dystopian America in the year 2037.
A fundamentalist expreacher named Haight is in the White House, and society is falling apart. Millions of people are giving up the warmth of human relations for the coldness of technology.
Arcadia is the creation of a genius, Juan Diego Reyes, an Albuquerque resident. Reyes is so obsessed with his work that he abandoned his family five years earlier.
His wife, Autumn, wants a divorce. She tracks him down to an office at Mesa del Sol. Autumn finds him living in a messy, smelly state of electronic equipment and dirty laundry.
Their children — Holly, Gideon and Devon — are trying to fix their own emotional compass.
New Mexico is a presence in the novel.
Early in the book, Holly and a friend visit the west-central New Mexico village of Quemado and from there go to see Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” a piece of art created in 1977 made up of 400 steel poles placed in a grid.
As Gandert says of Holly, “There was something magical about this precise configuration, and she walked through the work knowing that there were a power here, even if she didn’t understand it or know how to respond appropriately.”
Her brother, Gideon, is trying to relearn his roles in the music business as he contemplates leaving the hustle of New York City. Their younger brother, Devon, attends Albuquerque High, but for him school is “an easy segue between (video) games.”
Gandert, the author, is from Albuquerque and graduated from Albuquerque High in 2004. He went to Yale, where he majored in English and film studies. Gandert currently teaches English at Florida Southern College in Lakeland.
He said his first step as writer was participating in a program in which high school students wrote articles for the Albuquerque Journal.
Gandert, whose uncle is famous Albuquerque photographer Miguel Gandert, said Rudolfo Anaya and Jimmy Santiago Baca encouraged him to write.
Among Gandert’s favorite authors are those who incorporate satire, namely David Foster Wallace, Franz Kafka and Gabriel García Márquez. “I use satire as a political weapon to criticize society, to exaggerate certain elements and put them in different contexts,” Gandert said.
He’s also influenced by Albuquerque. To him, the city has seemed larger than life. “It’s not a huge city, but the things that happen in it always felt big, felt epic to me. And I felt it was the best place to put something satirical,” he said.