The Disposable Soma The Disposable Soma Book #1
Humorous Science Fiction, Political Satire
Independent
Nov. 10, 2023
Kindle
421
Amazon
The year is 2164 and politics has become unrecognizable. Democrats have become conservative, Republicans have become liberal, and an upstart party called the Empathy Party blames all the world's ills on sociopaths. An assassination leaves the Empathy Party's candidacy wide open and a clown car of candidates vies for the nomination. One, hotel heir and failed comedian Jim Liu, stands out from the others when he chooses a genetically modified, super-intelligent, opium-addicted parrot as his running mate. This book follows his quest to become the Empathy Party's nominee for the 2164 presidential election. His campaign takes him through an America where most days are public holidays, psychedelic drug use is widespread, and the last uncontacted people on Earth are the unknowing subjects of a reality show whose fans have tuned it into a new religion. Please note that this is a disturbing book, it is not written for children.
Review By Ulysses Dietz
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
This book is way outside my normal wheelhouse, but its dark humor engaged me instantly; a kind of Kurt Vonnegut absurdism that is very well done. It is a surreal experience made more surreal by the fact that it is uncomfortably familiar.
We are in the 2160s, and the world is both recognizable and a very strange place. We (meaning both the United States and the world in general) have survived a second Civil War, and a third World War, not to mention an almost-catastrophic comet strike, all of which were ended in an extreme way by a Chinese-American woman in the White House. That woman’s grandson, Jim Liu, a sort of half-failed standup comic and heir to a hotel-chain empire, is running for president. His running mate is a chip-enhanced African gray parrot named Betty—who is the lead singer of a rock band called The Jerrybags.
See? Aside from Jim Liu and his coterie, there is Neith Lemos, an up-and-coming investigative journalist with great courage and a highly malleable sense of ethics. Her narrative intertwines with Jim Liu’s as the Empathy Party seeks to shake up the tired old American two-party system.
One of the most interesting characters in the book is Betty, the parrot/rock star whose addiction to opium hasn’t hindered her success as one of the most famous pop vocalists in the world. The whole issue of parrots and their place in human society is never fully explained, but that’s part of the unnerving charm of this book: there’s a lot of craziness that never quite gets explained.
I somehow suspect that the author assumes that readers will be able to extrapolate the future he describes by looking around us right now in 2023. It is an apocalyptic vision in which the apocalypse seems to have all the moral heft of a Netflix series. This is not a criticism, but an endorsement. Haradon makes the reader think about NOW by positing an absurd world that is somehow inevitable, yet should never have been allowed to be.