Word: theroux
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...city with a desire to locate the unknown father of her son. Some 15 years before, she conceived after two years of copulating with a masked inseminator who had been eugenically selected at a "contact clinic." Fizzy, Moura's biologically tailored offspring, is the liveliest illustration of Theroux's future shock. He combines scientific genius with an arrogant and obnoxious mouth. He is also an example of postliterate man, a computer virtuoso who can barely write a simple message with a pencil. Yet Fizzy is young and, despite a hothouse upbringing, proves dramatically adaptable...
...novel's simple plot concerns a return to the O-Zone with Theroux's version of Tom Swift as technical consultant. A group of entrepreneurs wants to construct an artificial mountain to change the region's climate. Fizzy is captured by aliens, Daniel Boone throwbacks, who instruct him in the manly arts of survival and replace his prejudices with a sense of pride and possibility...
...Theroux is onto a good thing. The idea of wilderness is central to the American imagination. Nature's nation, as a scholar once called the U.S., defines itself by the open spaces it can occupy and eventually foul. The synthetic environments of Coldharbor and the Owners' vicarious entertainments pervert the definition of nation, to say nothing of personality. Connected by computer, talking to one another through radio-helmets, Theroux's privileged few incubate fantasies and promote hideous realities. The worst is a pornography of violence practiced by a private police force known as Godseye. They roam Manhattan's abandoned neighborhoods...
...from themselves. Yet hope glimmers. Hooper's voyeuristic passion is transformed when he brings his nymphet back from the O-Zone and she proves intelligent and sensitive. Moura gets to unmask her stud, thereby changing loneliness into at least a healthy lust. Masks are also important to Theroux's satiric intentions. "You can get away with anything in a mask," says Hooper, as he watches a woman strutting in the latest fashion: a face covering, some chains, sandals and nothing else...
...Theroux, always adept at following literary form, sticks to the basic rules of science fiction. The first is never invent the future, just extrapolate the present. The second: the hardware and social order should always be more impressive than the quality of life. O-Zone's projection of industrial society as a spreading toxic stain is not farfetched. Neither is its assumption of a self-sealed managerial elite, the establishment of airport- like security in the streets or even the possibility of renewal...