Book Review: 'Unisave' by Axel Madsen
‘Unisave’ (264 pp.) was published in February 1980 by Ace Books; the cover illustration is by Davis Meltzer.
‘Unisave’ is one of the worst SF book’s I’ve ever read.
I gave up on it at page 116, and getting that far was a real struggle.......
I gave up on it at page 116, and getting that far was a real struggle.......
The premise is interesting, if not particularly novel: in the year 2188, the extension of the human lifespan to ages of 125, or even 150, has led to the growth of Earth’s population to unsustainable numbers.
People live in enormous domed cities, while all land outside the domes is devoted to agriculture. Space colonies provide some degree of extra room, but the choice facing mankind is stark: the population must be reduced before catastrophic famine overwhelms the planet.
Unisave is a UN agency devoted to addressing the issue of overpopulation. Comprised of a multicultural team of sociologists, agronomists, demographers, and politicians, it will be up to Unisave to determine what, if any, measures can be used to avert a crisis. The number one contingency plan: forced euthanasia of randomly selected adults, based on a mass lottery, with no exemptions or exceptions.
The moral and philosophical dilemmas raised by employing such a measure in a humanistic society would seem to be suitable for some kind of dramatic narrative, but author Madsen simply isn’t up to the task.
The reader is subjected to a remarkably dull and plodding narrative consisting of conversational exchanges between various UN bureaucrats. These passages of dialogue are eye-glazingly boring.
There are SF terms and themes regularly popping up into the text, but so many other aspects of the book go awry that these themes simply are window-dressing.
Madsen can’t even get the names of his characters right; every character sports a first name and surname of no more than two syllables, like in postwar-era, juvenile sci-fi novels: Sal Belem. Viv Bord. Nilo Dor. Flo Hoo.
One unfortunate woman even bears the appellation Ter Ki ……
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