Landscape with invisible hand

This spare, short novel is a good companion to the author's FEED, which I felt was one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. This is disturbing, too, while also having the kind of dark, bleak humor as the earlier book. returnreturnThe landscape is the one Adam lives in and the one he paints, a suburban America that has become polluted and desperately poor while the rich live in floating villas high above. The invisible hand is Adam Smith's - only in this near future, the giant corporations that promise great technological advances provided they're given a free hand to make the most of the economy are from outer space. returnreturnThe vuvv don't look like our imagined aliens, more like boxy coffee tables, but they have a flair for commerce, which unfortunately leads to economic inequality, environmental catastrophe, a loss of employment except for precarious gigs and self-marketing through social media, and epidemic hunger and desperation. returnreturnThe vuvv have a particular yearning for American culture from the fifties and Adam and his girlfriend manage to support their families briefly by uploading falsified puppy love encounters. Being watched by aliens on a pay-per-view basis is not conducive to romance. Adam loses his girlfriend and before long he might also lose his chance to make the kind of art he makes - the landscapes that show what his world is really like, on the ground beneath the floating villas of the wealthy. returnreturnI read this story in one sitting. It's weirdly propulsive while also being laconic and often depressing. (Adam suffers from a humiliating disease caused by bad water that make him gurgle and fart and rush to the bathroom at awkward times - the anxieties of adolescence magnified.) The invisible hand is sometimes a little heavy, with the vuvv clearly representing the market fundamentalism that promises progress and delivers misery for most and enormous wealth for the undeserving rich. But there is still art, and even public libraries, and Anderson's own style, blunt as it is, can be lovely. For example, this passage near the end of the book: returnreturn"Ships arrive from other stars, tracing lines of credit and expense through the skies, constellations of commerce. We sit on the porch in the evening and listen to the insects chitter like the fever of our drained, exhausted Earth. Orbital stations glimmer in the last light. returnreturn"We thought there was a great distance between the future and us, and now here we are, falling through it." returnreturnSo lovely, but also with a Message, and as is often the case in novels of ideas it sometimes pokes out a little too much. In a way I found this novel less upsetting than FEED (perhaps because Adam and his sister are such decent people in spite of the degraded world they live in) but it has the same power to provoke thought. It's a bleak view of the future without the usual rebel-forces-fight-back salve. Instead, it just makes you think about the not-really-human life forms (multinational corporations) that have been granted human rights without responsibilities and have incredible power that make decisions about our planet and our lives while insisting on displays of a 1950s fake vision of who we are and what matters. returnreturnI don't do stars because so much depends on what you want from a book as a reader, but I thought it was very good and well worth reading as an unromanticized dystopia where (some of) the kids are all right but nobody is going to win love or battles because that's too easy. As William Gibson said in a recent interview, dystopia is already here, but unevenly distributed. The hardships these characters face are the lived experience of many on this planet - just without the spaceships.