GOLDEN STATE
Nothing but the truth
The novel that’s asking the question “What if the truth was based on lies?” Aren’t we all…
released 24 January 336 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Ben H Winters Publisher Century
In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” the international word of the year; in the court of public opinion, the argument goes, we’re now firmly in an era where feeling trumps fact. “It’s official,” declared the venerable Washington Post in response, maybe just a touch hyperbolically; “Truth is dead.”
The only correct science fictional response to this whole situation is, of course, to write some dystopian fiction about it. Ben Winters imagines a future society – the titular “Golden State” – in the grip of a cult of truth. Each day, a record of what is Objectively So is created and maintained through a host of elaborate mechanisms – including constant, wall-to-wall visual and audio recording, and exhaustive note-taking by every citizen about each interaction they have. Multiple layers of redundancy and archiving are built in, so nothing is ever lost, and nothing can be falsified.
Naturally, the reality isn’t so simple. Beneath its peaceful, affluent facade, the Golden State is ruthless: so sacred is the idea of truth that untruth is a grave crime. Liars, dreamers, and people suffering from delusions are drugged, imprisoned, or sent into a punishing desert exile. Everyone else, terrified of committing falsehood, starts each conversation with a bland recital of facts (“The Earth is in orbit around the Sun.” “And the Moon is in orbit around the Earth.”), and obsessively and obediently documents their lives.
But Winters’ latest is not just a dystopia; it’s also a postapocalyptic police procedural. Like China Miéville’s The City & The City, it uses the plot structure of a murder investigation to introduce the world as its characters believe it to be, and then, neatly and cleverly, to reveal its corrupt, unsavoury underbelly. That this framework also keeps the pages turning, with chapters frequently ending on intriguing new leads and shocking reveals, doesn’t hurt; the novel is every bit as pacey and compelling as you’d expect from a thriller. (It does, however, suffer from embracing one trope common to both its genres; we won’t say more here, though, for fear of spoilers.)
In the process, Winters explores the way we buy into the systems and structures that oppress us, often without realising it, and the way the cure for what we fear can often turn out to be worse than the disease. His protagonist, mid-ranking Speculator Laszlo Ratesic, is jaded and prickly, like any good noir detective; a loner who’s still hung up on his ex-wife and doesn’t take kindly to being landed with a chirpy rookie, Aysa Paige, for a new partner. But as grumpy as he is, Lazslo is unwavering in defence of the truth, and it’s in this unsettling portrait of a true believer – and the inevitable unravelling of his faith – that the novel’s strength rests. So utterly convinced is Laszlo of the Golden State’s integrity that he refuses to bend its rules even when he sees the harm it does.
The good man realising he’s on the wrong side isn’t a new story, by any means, but the near-future setting with its film-set perfection and its zeitgeisty angle on dystopia casts the tale in a fresh light. Laszlo’s awakening is tragic rather than triumphant, because it takes away so much that is important to him; it’s just a pity that the novel’s ending is so abrupt, as it robs us of the chance to find out more. Fundamentally, it seems, the Golden State’s appeal is that it offers security in a frighteningly confusing world; how much are people willing to endure, Winters asks, in return for a guarantee that there is only one true story about the world, and it is a knowable one? Nic Clarke
The cure for what we fear can be worse than the disease
Ben H Winters is also the co-writer of Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, a jukebox musical using the songs of Neil Sedaka.