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mathew 's review for:
This Perfect Day
by Ira Levin
This novel was clearly the primary inspiration for the RPG "Paranoia", so fans of that game will want to read it for that reason alone.
As an SF dystopia it stands up pretty well. The author holds back and tells the story dispassionately, leaving it up to the reader to decide what's good and bad, who's right and who's wrong. The technology is given little attention -- antigrav gets introduced from nowhere, perhaps invented during the decades the story covers? The portrayal of the computer stands up surprisingly well for a book written in 1969.
What hasn't aged well is the sexual politics of the protagonist's relationships with women, and in particular the rape scene. I'd like to think that it was a thoughtful portrayal of two humans who are coming off of decades of drugged docility and finding it impossible to deal with their hormonal urges, but in truth it's just a fairly typical late 60s "he rapes her and she falls in love with him" subplot. Irrelevant to the overall plot, so I'd suggest skipping a page or two there.
Also questionable is the racial angle -- are we supposed to find the Family's brown interbred uniformity horrifying compared to the diversity and outright racism of the humans outside UniComp's reach? Like many questions raised by the book, the author doesn't spell out the answer, and to a modern eye it's a tricky question to answer.
As an SF dystopia it stands up pretty well. The author holds back and tells the story dispassionately, leaving it up to the reader to decide what's good and bad, who's right and who's wrong. The technology is given little attention -- antigrav gets introduced from nowhere, perhaps invented during the decades the story covers? The portrayal of the computer stands up surprisingly well for a book written in 1969.
What hasn't aged well is the sexual politics of the protagonist's relationships with women, and in particular the rape scene. I'd like to think that it was a thoughtful portrayal of two humans who are coming off of decades of drugged docility and finding it impossible to deal with their hormonal urges, but in truth it's just a fairly typical late 60s "he rapes her and she falls in love with him" subplot. Irrelevant to the overall plot, so I'd suggest skipping a page or two there.
Also questionable is the racial angle -- are we supposed to find the Family's brown interbred uniformity horrifying compared to the diversity and outright racism of the humans outside UniComp's reach? Like many questions raised by the book, the author doesn't spell out the answer, and to a modern eye it's a tricky question to answer.