Golden State

Author: Ben H. Winters

Recommendation:          Good read for those who enjoy dystopian novels

I have to be honest – I have never read George Orwell’s 1984. It has been on my reading list for at least a decade and I have yet to pick it up. Reading The Golden State has motivated me – I will read 1984 this year.

I’ve read a couple reviews of The Golden State after I finished reading it. I usually don’t read reviews but the book felt rushed towards the end, and I wanted to see if I was the only one with that impression. I wasn’t. Several reviews compared the book to 1984, which is why I will be purchasing and reading it shortly.

The Golden State is situated in what we currently know as California. In the novel, there seemed to have been an incident, an unknown and unclear one, where California broke away from the union to create its own country – one that they would like you to think is a utopia and a wonderful place to live. The premise of this new society is that lying is a crime – a severely punishable one. The main character, Laszlo Ratesic, a Speculator of The Golden State, is sent to investigate a death – a seemingly clear accidental death of a roofer. But this death leads him to uncover that there are people who are trying to undermine The Golden State and its principal of the Objectively So (the only truth).

The novel is an interesting thought experiment to the alternate reality we currently live in – the era of #FakeNews. Today, if you click on the comments of any article posted on Social Media, no matter what end of the political spectrum it is written from, you will undoubtedly find someone (usually multiple people) crying “fake news.” This two word statement has become a way for people to express that they don’t believe the facts written in the news. It has become impossible to read anything these days without someone question its authority.

The Golden State is the response to this Fake News world. Everything is recorded and put on the Record. Every inch of the State is recorded at all times and people carry around Day Books to record who they have met with, where they went, what they ate. It’s a world of complete surveillance where no one can tell a lie because the truth is constantly being recorded. But even in this world, it turns out that not everything is as it seems.