6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderfully twisted tail of power and corruption..., September 4, 1998
By A Customer
...right in your own neighborhood. This is a strange book, but one of my favorites. It gets very strange, and could easily offend at many points. If you can find a copy, give it a try. This one is definitely a step above most of Laidlaw's books.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dad's Nuke, March 11, 2007
Science fiction writer Marc Laidlaw's debut novel, Dad's Nuke, takes place in the near future, in those not-so-far-off days of... 1998!?
Granted, this was a novel written over twenty years ago, when the late 1990s were a looming presence within the imaginations of sci-fi writers. And though the visions of Mr. Laidlaw never have come to pass almost ten years after this novel takes place, we can't really wish that they had.
First of all, William "Dad" Johnson - the distraught yet somewhat megalomaniacal protagonist - lives with his biologically-engineered family; a wife, seven or eight kids (depending on how one classifies the youngest, a grey-skinned infant who lives on radioactive waste from the nuclear reactor in Dad's garage), and a dog named Wolfie. And his community is unlike any we have ever seen - a little suburban neighbourhood with nosy neighbours, satellite television, maybe even the odd illicit affair here and there... with each family competing against each other for the most destructive atomic weaponry they could afford upkeep on in their back yards! The community, of course, is protected from the rest of the world (which, as it turns out, has been mostly destroyed during hyper-religious warring factions' attacks).
Sound pretty far-out? Don't worry - it is, but deliberately so. Mr. Laidlaw has created a tiny little universe filled with such things as planned aging (residents of the community receive injections which cause them to age a specific number of years so that they can achieve their ultimate life goals that much faster), 15-minute family vacations to anywhere in the world (which, thanks to time-altering properties, make one feel as if one has taken a week or two away from it all), and 100% incubatory babies (so that the delicate process of making a baby is never left to the instabilities of one's body, from conception to birth)!
The story is an obvious satire on modern living, yet it doesn't hesitate to bite into the crust of real science fiction. While not bogged down in technical details, the story does meander into territory which isn't exactly lucid. For example, the reader never fully understands the significance behind various groups and elements surrounding this little community because such details are not made clear at any point, but they play a vital role in how the tale unfolds. At other times, it feels as if critical parts of the story are left out for brevity's sake, while others are included, creating a miasmic mist of images which create a toxic atmosphere, but do little to further the story. In fact, the novel reads like a semi-frightening nightmare from which the mind wants to escape, yet allows to continue to see how events unfold.
The attraction of Dad's Nuke stems from its thematic similarities with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, without the pontification of obscure verbiage, and is mixed heartily with the surrealistic humour of Terry Gilliam's film Brazil. The downfallings - or, the reason why this novel is long out of print - can be attributed to the sketchiness of the plot, the under-development of many of the potentially rich characters, and the overall sense that the novel simply does not elaborate on the very things that would help to clarify the reasons behind why the story unfolds as it does.
Because it does merit being read, this book is a great find on the shelf of a public library, though it does not invite itself to be read more than once.
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