Nik Abnett

The Wipe by Nik Abnett has good and bad parts. The first part is Dharma trying to research her genealogy to find a living relative. The story goes back and forth between Dharma's search and connection to a cousin, and the lives of her grandmother and great-aunt. What I disliked about it was the absolutely sterile lives these people lived.

Spoiler alert......

What bothered me most was the assumption that all bad politicians died during the plague that swept the planet. There are young bad politicians as well. Another thing that bothered me was the characters acceptance of the government's manipulations. The wipe of the title is a chemical, that people are constantly doused with to make them accept their circumstances. I found that highly disturbing.… (plus d'informations)

The Wipe
I enjoyed this one.
It was an interesting take on the present situation and how it might develop.
It starts as a pretty clear dystopia in "the New Wave" after a virus called "the Deluge" (its identification code includes the letters TRRNT). Nobody has freedom of movement, everyone has to enter a chemical wipe going between buildings, and people work both isolated and overcrowded in data entry cubicles.
Bizarrely, there's little mention of entertainment or any cultural thing at all: people can use the spare capacity of their internet to run searches.
Recent-ish history has been so eradicated that the ordinary people of the New Wave have little concept of sex or intimate connection of any kind apart from mothers and children--the children grow up with their mothers and no real concept of how life was otherwise apart from downloading school. Fathers are abstracted into ID codes, and so are places (it takes a character a while to work out BRd1 is the London Borough of Bromley, and how different English places are connected). Dharma doesn't know what flower the scent in her Wipe is.
It's only where we see the terrible effects of the coming of "the Deluge" in Verity's viewpoint, we see how much was clamped down at the time.
But the characters Verity and her serious boyfriend do get back to their parents'.
It's here I find a problem. The household is very close-knit, and people are coping by growing their own vegetables, relying on each other, and not keeping the connected world they used to have, and for handwavy reasons this is both good for the planet and good for people. They give thoughtful presents to each other.
The problem I find is that an awful lot of the idealised stuff is (consciously or not) going back to the War, where people kept busy, kept healthy, managed food etc with a strong belief they were all in it together, and people weren't likely to get anything much from the outside. It's our national myth for the English--the just-about-within-living-memory just war.
If people could stay very local and help out and share in the local community, that would be a way to ease humanity's footprint on the Earth, which is implied by the ending of the book--but it's not at all clear who's running it for what purpose.
There were a couple of entertainment TV programmes involving "Back in Time for Dinner" and "Back in Time to the Corner Shop", where a family moved through time a year per day. It was interesting, and the "shopping" version worked well--but it worked well because for the Corner Shop everybody had rationing and was in the same boat, and the family was picked to give it a shot and see what happened. At the moment, people don't want to give up anything--see fusses about haircuts and holidays abroad and pubs and Christmas and so on. The bad side of the Internet bubbles is that we're all isolated and relatively few of us are hanging together. We can see how badly politics is going at the moment, and how irrationally people are acting. We can see that in fact various governments are not acting in people's best interests, and the sorting-out from selfish manipulative governments happens at the end of the book with a bit of handwaving.
The "present-day" characters Dharma and Blythe find each other as cousins, and Con (who works with Blythe) is implied to be a genetic match to have a relationship/baby with her if she works that out. The three of them end up as a close friendship group who can easily find out what they want and have a life together, but I’m not quite so optimistic after what Covid, Brexit and populist authoritarian politics have done with the world.
The ending is very clearly a breath of fresh air for the story, implying things sort themselves out given the chance,… (plus d'informations)

Disclosure: Got ebook as part of LibraryThing early reviewers. The author, publisher, nor LibraryThing had any say in this honest review. Nor did they get to read this before it was public.

When I first read the description for this book I was excited. It's very relevant to COVID-19 and will be relevant after it (if we ever go back to the old normal, or we go into a new normal) . While it does make references to the 2020 COVID-19 it doesn't go into anything technical and can be enjoyed for years to come.

When I first started reading it was slow and multiple times I was unsure if I wanted to continue reading. But I'm glad I kept reading and finished.

There are many characters which make it hard to keep track of all of them, I almost needed to have a paper beside me that has notes on each characters so I wouldn't have to pause and try remember what happened with this characters in previous characters before continuing to read.

There are about 3 stories that happen in the book, they are all relevant to each other (I'm not going to spoil how) which you wouldn't realize until you read more of the book.

There was great detail in this book, which allowed me to visually see the story as it was happening.

If you are into science-fiction, fiction, or the future then I would suggest you read this book.

There are some sentences in this book that made me laugh when I read them. I'm only going to include a few of them to ensure there isn't any spoilers.

"Sage was quiet, but Sage was always quiet."

"People had strange occupations that she had never heard of and couldn’t imagine."

“Okay, but won’t people simply go back to their old habits once the curfew is lifted, and we can all go about our business?” “Time is the other factor,” he said. “Time?” “Time’s important for breaking and embedding habits.”

"Motivation is a difficult thing to work out from data, even if you know what you’re looking at. "… (plus d'informations)