O-Zone [Hardcover]

Paul Theroux (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1986

"Remarkable... Powerful... Mesmerizing... Lyrical."
Susan Cheever
Welcome to the America of the 21st century. The O-Zone is a forbidding land of nuclear waste, mutants, and aliens. Except for one place that is a beautiful oasis amidst the destruction. When two aliens are shot that look suspiciously human, Hooper Allbright, disurbed by the memories of those he once loved, goes back down into the O-Zone to try to reach the people he lost, though they may be unreachable by now....
"Smart, witty, grotesque, and brutal."
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Theroux's view of humanity is becoming increasingly bleak even as he stretches his reach with this novel that brilliantly depicts the world as it may become. In the not-too-distant future, America has turned into a police state and a rigidly class-obsessed, terrifyingly racist society. On the verge of anarchy, the country is fragmented into many chaotic parts. The Owners, the remnant elite who live in armed enclaves protected by fearsome security forces, feel menaced by aliensalso called Roaches, Trolls, Skells, Starkiesall those who lead desperate lives of poverty and despair. A group of eight Owners, including a near-genius adolescent, seek an adventurous thrill in a rocket trip to the forbidden area of the O-Zone, formerly the Ozarks, which has been sealed off following massive nuclear contamination. The experience changes all of them, and a second, secret voyage there has terrifying consequences. Theroux has vizualized every detail of his desolate, all-too-plausible world. His scathing social commentary is powerful and convincing; his characters, while too unappealing to win the readers' sympathy, etch themselves in the mind. This highly literate science fiction is not a pleasant book to read, but it is a significant contribution to the literature of what may be a preapocalyptic world.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

A nuclear dump seems hardly the place for a New Year's party, but O-Zone is such a dump and that is where Hardy and Hooper Allbright take their friends. Flying from fortress New York City, they are stunned by the beauty of what had once been the Ozarks but is now a restricted zone of poison. The party is alone in this wilderness, or so they think until a clash with "aliens" leads to Fizzy Allbright's capture, an event that changes all their lives. O-Zone is Theroux's vision of life in the technological future, and although expansive in its tableau of society, it seems more interesting for its gadgets than its characters, who plod through a cliched plot. Some of the repetition is pointless and painful, not echoing the crisp strength of Theroux's The Mosquito Coast ( LJ 2/1//82). Paul E. Hutchison, English Dept., Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd; First Edition edition (October 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0241119480
• ISBN-13: 978-0241119488
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,991,748 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Theroux's highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great SF from a 'serious' writer, January 4, 2000

By 

Doug Vaughn - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: O-Zone (Hardcover)

Another surprise from a writer who keeps reinventing his art, O-Zone is a book about the future we fear, but filled with characters we know and can relate to. Theroux's greatest talent, it seems to me, is the authority with which he creates the various worlds he presents in his novels. From the jungles of the Amazon, to big city melodrama, to the fantasy tale of Millroy the Magian or the harsh reality of The Family Arsenal, he presents characters and situations that seem too real to be mere inventions. In O-Zone he tackles the SF genre and does it in style. An almost picaresque tale of a journey into a forbidden desolate 'outback', by charaters unfitted by wealth and easy living to deal with what they find, Theroux's story deals with a range of social and human issues with both excitement and humor.

This book, like so much of Theroux, can be read strictly for fun or delved into for deeper meaning. All in all, another very satisfying fiction from one of our best contemporary writers.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent drama against a sci-fi backdrop, December 15, 2003

By 

Michael J Edelman (Huntington Woods, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: O-Zone (Hardcover)

O-Zone is a rather unusual book for Paul Theroux, a drama in a futuristic setting rather than the contemporary setting of his other novels. Reading O-Zone brings to mind Huxley's Brave New World, both for the portrayal of the world in which it is set, and for the inevitible comparison with another noted novelist who wrote a single book set in a futuristic world.

I've noticed that Sci-Fi fans as a group don't much care for O-Zone, as it violates a lot of the accepted rules of the genre- as does Brave New World, for that matter, and Huxley has never been that popular with hard core SciFi readers either. Both books use the future world as a setting to explore relationships between people, and to make certain plot developments possible, but neither gets into much detail regarding the technology.

Like Brave New World, O-Zone explores the alienation of modern man in this world of the future, and the consequant attraction to the primative and atavistic world that is found on the reservation (Huxley) or in the contaminated lands of the O-Zone. And in both books, some of the protagonists go in search of amusement and entertainment from the primatives, but find something disturbingly similar to themselves.

Despite the strong parallels, O-Zone owes nothing in the way of plot of development to Brave New World. The story is as original as anything Theroux's written, the characters are fully developed and well motivated, and the story compelling.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting and Imaginative, January 4, 2010

By 

D. Ashal "Just some dude" (Aztlan, holmes) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: O-Zone (Mass Market Paperback)

I've never read any other books by Paul Theroux, who seems to get compared to Updike a lot, but I've enjoyed his longform journalism and he is as good at writing dystopian, near-future sci-fi as anyone I've run across. The book captures a society ruled by xenophobia perfectly, as well as the viciousness of people to whom mob mentality is a sort of hobby. The small cultural/sartorial/technological details of the book are mostly pretty good, with ideas that are often believable (e.g., women go to brothels where the masked sperm donors have sex with them, and people can sort of accept this because it's done for the sake of having super-smart children). The contrasts between the isolated, tiered cities and the stone-age countryside is done skillfully and unnervingly, and the sense of dread the city dwellers seem to have when out of their cities is conveyed with genuine tension. Life among the "aliens" in the O-Zone as a flipside shows people that are as complex and multifaceted as anyone, not simply played off as noble savages or outlaws. The characters, from a murderous posse member, to a stern tribal leader, to a precocious social misfit, to a wealthy business and the teenage "alien" whom he becomes infatuated with and abducts,are all believable; Theroux doesn't show us people at their best, but rather driven by familiar and often conflicting urges and traits. Dialogue is fairly bizarre but works within the book's social context and is handled well, with offhand remarks and observations often being intensely insightful. A very good book if you don't mind it being a total freakin' downer and have any interest in near-future sci-fi.