Written by Cornelius Walters, THE CRUEL FAULT OF TIME is a science fiction novel that begins on the planet Pollus. The state of technological development approximates that a few hundred years from now, “Astral transportation” will allow one to manifest into another body (with the proper equipment) in a remote location as a lived experience. There really is something Huxleyesque about this aspect of the novel. In its shoulder-shrugging depiction of life on Pollus, billions of minions trade their labor by day for life’s necessities (now packaged not in houses, but in comfortable living pods). They also amuse themselves in inexhaustible virtual reality scenarios by night (via a vast online network called The Hive), which all resembles Brave New World in terms of its mental landscape. Walters borrows liberally from the greats of SF literature. The “utero-simulators” of Pollus, no less the evident repurposing of sex solely for pleasure, evoke Huxley. The image of “Father”—a ubiquitous leader figurehead—puts one in mind of Orwell’s Big Brother or Mitchell’s Papa Song. The mandatory limit on life—forty-five years—revisits meditations on euthanasia explored to good effect in Logan’s Run.
The action revolves around Adam’s escape of his humdrum life via a vacation that, though it will take only two weeks on Pollus, will translate to thirty years’ worth of living on Earth in the body of one Roy Landon—whose experience of twenty-first century America is not what he was bargaining for. The science of it all does not hold up, but Walters’s focus is not on the details; it’s on the social and political commentary. By the time twenty-five years of Adam’s “vacay” have gone by, Roy is an immigration officer living in 2041: a time in which the law allows for the shooting of illegal immigrants. Presidents can serve multiple terms; one NoleX (the supposed son of a real-life oligarch whose identity is not hard to guess at) occupies the role of a tech-bro billionaire whose “lovely drones” will, in his imagining, police a “United States of White North America;” and the agenda of Christian nationalism is on display in every classroom.
It is sledgehammery at times, to be sure, but hardly inapposite. Asking urgent questions about the trajectory of American civic and social life, THE CRUEL FAULT OF TIME performs a valuable public service. And if, as Braque held, art is a wound that turns into light, Walters succeeds in illuminating all that has the potential to be good about the nation.
Though on-the-nose in the telling, Cornelius Walters’s THE CRUEL FAULT OF TIME is a timely SF-tinged exploration of the state of society in the early twenty-first century.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader