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O-Zone Mass Market Paperback – August 12, 1987
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
- Print length535 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherIvy Books
- Publication dateAugust 12, 1987
- Dimensions4.5 x 1.25 x 7 inches
- ISBN-100804101515
- ISBN-13978-0804101516
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From the Inside Flap
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
Product details
- Publisher : Ivy Books (August 12, 1987)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 535 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0804101515
- ISBN-13 : 978-0804101516
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.5 x 1.25 x 7 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,337,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #38,515 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled first to Italy and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi, and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels. Among these were Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers, all of which appear in one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift (Penguin, 1996).
In the early 1970s Paul Theroux moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and then on to London. He was a resident in Britain for a total of seventeen years. In this time he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books, from which a selection of writings were taken to compile his book Travelling the World (Penguin, 1992). Paul Theroux has now returned to the United States, but he continues to travel widely.
Paul Theroux's many books include Picture Palace, which won the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Pillars of Hercules, shortlisted for the 1996 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; My Other Life: A Novel, Kowloon Tong, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Fresh-air Fiend and Hotel Honolulu. Blindness is his latest novel. Most of his books are published by Penguin.
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It is a book about the dystopian future, a time of the haves and the have nots, in this case the "owners" and the "savages," the latter content (content?) to run around the fenced perimeter, hence the name O-Zone, which means Outside Zone. The characters, well, we can relate to them all, from the rich naked women shopping in masks or having sex with men wearing masks at the local sperm bank, to our young protagonist who manages to escape the confines of his climate controlled high rise apartment for a day of walking (alone!) around the city, to the xenophobic redneck of tomorrow who spends his entire consciousness plotting how to maim or kill the people living in the O-Zone, to those very "savages," people living hardscrabble lives on the fringes of society, forever on the lookout for helicopter gunships that will slaughter them like the Europeans and their descendents slaughtered the buffalo (shades of drone technology soon to come) hundreds of years before.
I can't remember how the O-Zone got that way, but my foggy memory tells me that there was some sort of nuclear holocaust, the "owners" took the prime real estate, and every else got what was left. In the O-Zone, there isn't much, but there are people there roaming around in loose tribes, and their faculties are pretty much fully developed, but somehow they ended up on the outside, which in not fully explained. The "owners" refuse, or are simply unwilling, to acknowledge this reality, that being that these people are thinking, rational, human beings. Kind of like many people today are unwilling to acknowledge that people of other faiths or ethnic groups are worth valuing as much as are the people of their own clan.
Naked people wearing masks, helicopter gunships, powerful halogen search lights, police patrols, vigilante "justice" ("I burned them down,") giant video screens, closed circuit cameras galore, people living their entire lives in totally antispeptic existences in apartments stuck on top of high rise buildings, a future that only the most vivid nightmare could possibly conjure.
For the time being, a great escape from reality. But, the irony is, this is what the world could someday be like.
Five stars. Rick says check it out.
Another idea being critiqued is the idea of a hyper-secure, privacy-violating police state. Because of the unrationalizing fear of the other, the Owners of Cold Harbor waive all their rights and go through intense security checks in order to obtain safety. However, as the book progresses we see how unsafe, despite all its security checks, Cold Harbor really is. Godseye flies over the city every night and attacks anyone who displays fear or seems suspicious; on one of these hunts a female mistaken for an `alien' is murdered and the murderers are not only unprosecuted, but encouraged to continue their nightly massacres. And as we later discover, many aliens are masquerading as Owners, showing that the security measures are all a farce.
The book--though set in the future--deals with many of the problems of today, including: immigration, oppression of the poor to sustain the high quality living of the developed world, corporate greed, political cover up (the government hides information about Ozone's contamination by Nuclear waste), fear leading to a police state, etc. When I first started this book, I detested the characters and found the book a little dry, but as the story progresses one begins to understand the characters psyches and it is fun to watch their transformations. Theroux shows how the primitive often are the most civilized of us all. Theroux writes an entertaining, suspenseful novel that warns us of a future that might come to fruition if we do not alter our current course.
As far as the rest of his dystopian vision goes, well... we’re not so far away from that reality nowadays, are we? As the rich continue to get richer, and the powers that be keep the rest of us distracted, and at each other’s throats(with plenty of help from the now ratings driven media). It’s not his best novel, but his work is always worth reading...I read it when it first came out, and twice more since. The NY Times reviewer didn’t seem to get it...not at all.



