Techno apocalypse
Alena Graedon's pacing and smart writing in The Word Exchange make it a funny and frightening read
PUBLISHED ON MAY 4, 2014 12:22 AM
Orion Books/Paperback/384 pages/$27.99 before GST/Major bookstores/****
American author Alena Graedon's debut novel is the funniest and most frightening book I have read recently about apocalypse triggered by technology.
Last September, Margaret Atwood concluded the MaddAddam trilogy about genetic engineering turning humans into beasts and animals into intelligent monsters. Last October, Dave Eggers in The Circle wrote of a world where social media deprives individuals of privacy and dignity.
The Word Exchange is subtler and therefore more believable. It follows the slow collapse of a world where people let their smart devices do too much of their thinking. Cellphones with taxi booking apps have been replaced by snazzy
"Memes" which order cabs, direct and even drive them, finally beaming a payment back to the taxi company.
These devices do so much for users that people no longer have to remember the meaning of words such as "ubiquitous" or "paradox", or even "naive". Memes will download definitions and necessary information at a negligible fee, explaining e-mail, text messages and books as quickly as the eye can scan each word. Profits from these downloads from the "word exchange" go to the few technocrats who own all online dictionaries and are seeking to buy out the few still in print.
Only a few people refuse to use Memes, such as Doug, editor of the North American Dictionary Of The English Language. When he disappears days before the launch of the final print edition of the book, his daughter and secretary Anana discovers that a mysterious plague is overcoming Meme users like her, stripping them of language and leaving them feverish and incoherent.
The Word Exchange updates a premise familiar to readers of speculative fiction.
Thirty years ago, William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer had humans rely heavily on connection to a worldwide Web of information, while the plot of Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash hinged on a computer virus shutting down language functions in heavy users of the Internet.
In Graedon's world, characters are only slightly exaggerated from today's reality as they outsource many traditional higher language functions to smart devices. The dangers of doing this are apparent to anyone who has had spell-checker or predictive text ruin an e-mail or text.
In The Word Exchange, words and information have become tradable currency and technocrats can capitalise on this by garbling e-mails and text, and only decoding them at a price.
The owners of the dictionary can also change the meaning of a word, a power with frightening implications. As Doug points out to Anana, "freedom" is not the same as "democracy", but both have come to be used interchangeably.
Graedon is not quite endorsing printed books over e-books. She is pointing out that it is easier to hijack information and twist meaning secretly in the fluid, easily updated online world. Censored phrases and cut-out pages are apparent in printed books and magazines. Online text provides fewer clues. One must mull over context and ramifications, a behaviour not supported by the prevalent read-and-react mentality fuelled by social media.
In addition to its fright value, The Word Exchange is tongue-in-cheek funny. Anana is not the cleverest or most sympathetic of heroines, just an average young woman trying to find her missing father and no more or less special than any other of her generation.
Midway through the book, her suitability for the role of heroine is the subject of a committee meeting among the rebels working against the technology conspiracy: If they recruit her, clues will have to be made very obvious, someone points out.
There are a few flaws here, such as needless footnotes and graceless information dumps, but the book's smart writing and pacing make up for these, and also for the predictable romance between Anana and her colleague, Bart.
The novel alternates their voices and Bart, a lexicographer, is bombastic in his first few appearances - he might lacrimate, instead of merely crying - possibly in order to let readers share the confusion of infected Meme users.
His vocabulary changes over time, as does Anana's, allowing readers to participate in the lead-up to the plague, the height of the disease and the eventual decline.
Chapter titles also reflect this progression, each following a letter of the alphabet. My favourite is the first "A: Alice" which explains the word as "a girl transformed by reflection". As Anana grows in maturity and understanding, she exchanges her old name for that of the Lewis Carroll character who enters a strange mirror world both like and unlike her own. Reading The Word Exchange is a lot like what stepping through the looking glass might be today. The occasional mid-page run to a dictionary, printed or online, is worth it - and possibly, the point all along.
If you like this, read: The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013, Hamish Hamilton, $29.91, major bookstores). A young worker hired by the world's most powerful Internet company finds its process of expansion swallows her own ideas and desires as well as her family's.
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