Disturbingly real near futures

• Author: Sara Keating
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Published date: 19 December 2020

It would perhaps be a contradiction to describe Baker's dystopian stories as patriotic, and yet the disturbing sense of plausible reality in the near futures he imagines creates a cumulative sense of warning. If you think the cultural crisis in America is bad now, Baker's gentle push against the truth suggests, just wait until you see what's coming.

Why Visit America can be read as a prophecy, with Baker urging his fellow Americans to pay attention before it is too late. The lexicographer narrator of Fighting Words would describe the effect of the book as "othery: suffering experienced through empathy for another's suffering".

Fighting Words is the opening story in the collection, and the sense of hope that accrues around its protagonists is exceptional. It follows a gentle, sensitive lexicographer and his brother on a vigilante mission to right a wrong done to their niece by a psychopathic local teenager, Nate.

"We will hurt the boy in a way that he will feel and keep feeling and never stop feeling, mutilate his psyche in a way that will make him fear us and what we are capable of even after we are dead."

In their quest for revenge, however, the brothers realise that Nate has also been hurt, transformed, by his own trauma. However, their compassion represents an act of what the lexicographer calls "diffiction": it is "inconsistent with the shared reality of others . . . nonfictional to an individual but fictional to the individual's society". Nate, inevitably, will go on terrorising the community.

Procreational needs In Baker's other stories, however, the threat posed is a broader social one. In Transition, a young man decides to embrace a post-corporeal existence when he undergoes an irreversible procedure that converts his mind to digital data. In Bad Day in Utopia men live in menageries, "living sperm banks", which women visit for procreational needs. In One Big Happy Family, a system of universal childcare ensures children cannot be mistreated by their parents; they are separated at birth. Lost Souls, meanwhile, gives birth to the idea of empty-bodied babies: living infants without sentient minds. In Life Sentence, a criminal has had his memory wiped; a cheaper and more efficient way of dealing with recidivism in the justice system. As his parole officer explains to him...