You might associate the phrase “as above, so below” with an abysmal found-footage horror film, but it actually dates back to the Middle Ages, when alchemists believed small parts of the universe reflected the larger whole. Today, there is scientific evidence to support the idea of “microcosms” in nature and sociology, but the new post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel FKA USA offers some literary proof.
FKA USA is set in the 2080s, when the country “formerly known as the United States Of America” has fractured into nearly two dozen independent nation-states. Climate change has ruined the environment. Everyone is miserable, even the androids. But a 16-year-old factory worker can save the world if he safely transports a talking goat from Little Rock, Arkansas (now a fake-food factory town) to San Francisco.
Heading west through sometimes toxic, sometimes irradiated wastelands, accompanied by a female-identifying robot named Sammy and a cyborg named Tiny Tim, the factory worker and the talking goat (Barnaby) pass through all manner of end-times societies, including a group of satanists that mistakes Barnaby for Black Phillip himself. Overall, it’s a nice high-concept premise for a science fiction quest novel, if a bit trope-worn.
Now, the microcosm: The factory worker’s name is Truckee Wallace. He lives in a city called Crunchtown 407, in a country called “Crunch, United, Colonies.” Some of the other nation-states include “Sinopec TeMaRex Affiliated” and “Green Mountain Associated Intentional Communities.” The very first page of the book contains this bauble of a sentence: “Ever since Crunch, United, had made the swag stuff like Real-Friends® and Worldburn: Apocalypse illegal, there just wasn’t a point.”
Imagine, for a moment, what kind of whole would spring from these comically cumbersome parts. Imagine if it was 480 pages long with copious footnotes and five appendices, all full of viscous exposition. Somehow, it was published by a big five imprint and optioned by Warner Bros. for a feature film.
FKA USA is exhausting. Instead of telling a story, the author packs every page with as many convoluted world-building references and one-liners as possible. It feels less like a novel and more like a movie treatment crowdsourced by studio executives, who then passed the writing off to one of their teenage nephews. Perhaps that’s why FKA USA was published under a pseudonym, though the jacket copy assures us “Reed King” is a New York Times bestselling author and a TV writer.
Whoever wrote FKA USA, they’ve probably read George Saunders’ masterful short story “Jon,” and played one or more video games in the Fallout franchise. Like Saunders’ titular hero, Truckee Wallace has a few idiosyncratic speech patterns (“could of” instead of “could have”), and his narration attempts a similar volume of comedy. But Truckee mostly comes across as a juvenile asshole, and the “jokes” are more Adam Sandler than George Saunders.
“The problem with foreigners was simple: they carried disease,” Truckee claims in chapter one, which sounds like the kind of bias a hero will eventually have to confront, but there’s no time for that in FKA USA. He refers to the 2080s as “the sticky, smelly, post-climax part of human history,” and to government agents as “everywhere and nowhere, like a poisonous fart.” When he learns about his goat-delivering task to save the world, “the atmosphere curdled like piss.” If you think those lines are funny, you’ll find FKA USA hilarious.
There’s an ongoing debate about whether critics should even write negative reviews, and it’s only getting louder. No well-meaning writer enjoys panning the work of another, but anything other than an honest appraisal would turn critics into publicists, and the truth is—despite a great cover and a clever premise—there are Wikipedia pages more narratively compelling than FKA USA. The map on the endpapers is the best part of the book.
Were it not for the Warner Bros. deal, one might wonder if “Reed King” is the Alan Smithee of the publishing industry. But there is hope: If screenwriters can turn a book like The Martian into a great movie, perhaps the film adaptation of FKA USA will deliver on the premise.
22 Comments
Um, if your piss curdles, you might want to see your doctor.
“Okay, well, we’ll need a urine sample. Here’s a cup.”“Thanks. Uh, I might need a spoon as well.”
Well this sounds dreadful.
Oof, even Publisher’s Weekly had nothing good to say about it. https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-250-10889-0
Why should professional writers write negative reviews when so many wannabe writers can write negative reviews on Goodreads? Or you know, if they get enough people on Twitter to hate the writer for whichever reason this week, then it can get a bunch of one star reviews from people never read it?Sorry, i hate goodreads. Also, i was looking forward to this book, so this review makes me sad. I’ll probably just wait for it to be a miniseries on Netflix or something.
You won’t need to wait that long. The article mentions that Warner Bros optioned the movie rights.
LibraryThing or nothing. GoodReads is for near-illiterates.
This sounds awful, so awful I almost want to read it. Am I the only person who liked The Martian? It was a harmless, easy read – not everything needs to be Shakespeare to be enjoyable.
This review is literally the first place I’ve seen “The Martian” (the book) referred to as anything less than “decent,” and most accounts that I’ve seen and heard consider it pretty good (my own opinion included.) It’s got a fun premise, an entertaining central character, relatively solid science (from a layman’s perspective, at least,) and it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
The Martian was a very popular book. This opinion that it was a bad read is the outlier.
Did you publish a review of The Martian? I listened to the audiobook and thought it was decent, but good narrators tend to make bad books sound better than they are written.
The “could of” thing guarantees all by itself that I’ll never read this book. It’s “could’ve”! This is one of my biggest pet peeves on the Internet, so seeing it written that way IN A NOVEL would be completely intolerable.
You’ll find it in plenty of novels; it’s a very common and longstanding device to mark someone’s speech as rustic, uneducated or low-prestige (e.g. cockney).
Terry Pratchett, for example, uses it all the time. In Good Omens he uses it for dialog by the kids, while in the Discworld books he uses it for the witches, among others.
In fact, it’s so common that it seems weird to call it an “idiosyncratic
speech pattern” – not to mention that it and the correct spelling are effectively homophones, so there isn’t even anything odd about it in speech. The respelling is a pure “eye dialect” on the part of the author.
If screenwriters can turn a book like The Martian into a great movie Come on. The Martian was a good book. I liked the movie better – it’s possible that Duncan was thinking of a movie when he wrote the novel – but it’s not like the book was precious, unreadable, warmed-over David Foster Wallace by way of Snowcrash by way of imitation Saunders, as this book seems to be.
I too liked a book like The Martian.
Andy Weir wrote The Martian. Who’s this Duncan you speak of? Did he create Duncan Donuts?
was “abysmal” a description of As Above, So Below’s quality, or the literal content of the movie? because I can think of nothing in the film that warrants the former
Yeah even this very website gave it a “C+” so calling it abysmal seems like a stretch.
I read the linked article, and my hackles rose as soon as it got to the part about some websites declaring a “no negative reviews” policy. That immediately invalidates your sites entire critical output, in my opinion. If you want a kinder approach to criticism, by all means institute some kind of anti-snark policy; demand that the criticisms be solely evidence-based (as much as criticism can be) and refrain from taking cheap shots. (I personally would dislike this, as I love a good snarky pan, but I can see the value.) But just refusing to post anything, well, critical robs your readers of engaging debates about the merits of what is considered good and bad writing in the current environment. Not to mention that if you’re only publishing positive reviews, and a certain book gets no review at all, well, that would seem to tell you something about that book straight away, wouldn’t it?
Your anti-snark policy intrigues me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.(Seriously. A certain degree of negativity is necessary for any kind of honest criticism. But frankly, too many critics these days sound like they’re determined to join the same catty high-school clique.)
What’s more, rarely are critiques binary thumbs up/down. A good critique can be negative while still saying “if you’re part of this audience you’d enjoy this work”, or “this is a well-written example of this genre, if you like that niche then this may be for you” while still not thinking the work has wider merit beyond niche appeal to genre buffs.
Likewise, you can praise something while acknowledging “a lot of people won’t like this thing here” or “This character sucks but the plot is worth it” or “the dialogue sparkles but the plot falls flat” or the like.
Um…the book The Martian was actually good.