SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: Vigilance by Robert Jackson Bennett

Vigilance is the newest work from author Robert Jackson Bennett.  I learned about RJB when his "The Divine Cities" trilogy made the Best Series shortlist at last year's Hugos, and since then all four books of his I've read have been absolute gold.  Vigilance is a novella (listed at 192 pages in paperback) that deals with a more realistic future than the other RJB books I've read, taking place in a dystopian but realistic future of our world, rather than a fantasy world.*

*RJB's bibliography shows he has written books set in our world before, but I haven't gotten to them yet.*

And holy cow is Vigilance a chilling look at a potential future of America, based upon our country's obsession with guns and its failure to deal with the implications of such.  Just tremendous.

More after the jump:


Plot Summary:  America, 2030.  A Country with failing demographics, with the young and able having left the country and the unable and old left behind.  A Country holding on to supposed glories....and to the value of its guns to defending against those who would attack it.  A Country where everyone fears everything....

John McDean is the producer of Vigilance, the reality show that has taken hold of the nation's attention.  Based upon the fascination of Americans with mass-shootings, the show arms potential candidates and sets them loose with weapons on an area crowded with people and broadcasts everything to the masses.  Using the best AI, neural networks and technology, McDean seeks to cater to his audience and to use this bloodshed to garner the greatest ratings possible.  But there is only so far one can exploit the fear of a nation, the fear that leads to mass armaments, without everything boiling over, as John McDean and America is soon to learn.....

Thoughts:  Vigilance is stunning. The idea of making mass shootings into a reality show is something that seems incredibly silly...but Bennett presents it in a way as to make it seem an incredibly possible place for American Society to be going, and it really works.  And by splitting the story between McDean - which shows the chilling amount of inhuman calculation that goes into the whole thing - and an innocent minority bystander, a young black woman named Delyna who sees the horror for what it is, we really see all sides of the awful brutality America has set itself up to possibly bring to pass with its unstoppable gun culture.  The story is absolutely riveting in its demonstration of this, moving in unpredictable ways towards a shocking conclusion which was absolutely not where I thought it would be going, and yet is just utterly scary and realistic at the same time.

I keep using the word "chilling" here, and man do I mean it - because what Bennett has done is paint a picture of a future that seems all too real and yet is utterly too scary to contemplate at the same time.  But the reader of this novella will be forced to contemplate it, and cannot look away.