Reed King

Reed King’s amazingly audacious novel is something of a cross between L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, Douglas Adams’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Ernie Cline’s Ready Player One. In Reed King’s wildly imaginative and possibly prescient debut, the United States has dissolved in the wake of environmental disasters and the catastrophic policies of its final president. It is 2085, and Truckee Wallace, a factory worker in Crunchtown 407 (formerly Little Rock, Arkansas, before the secessions), has no grand ambitions besides maybe, possibly, losing his virginity someday. But when Truckee is thrust unexpectedly into the spotlight he is tapped by the President for a sensitive political mission: to deliver a talking goat across the continent. The fate of the world depends upon it. The problem is—Truckee’s not sure it’s worth it. Joined on the road by an android who wants to be human and a former convict lobotomized in Texas, Truckee will navigate an environmentally depleted and lawless continent with devastating—and hilarious—parallels to our own, dodging body pickers and Elvis-worshippers and logo girls, body subbers, and VR addicts. Elvis-willing, he may even lose his virginity. FKA USA is the epic novel we’ve all been waiting for about the American end of times, with its unavoidable sense of being on the wrong end of the roller coaster ride. It is a masterwork of ambition, humor, and satire with the power to make us cry, despair, and laugh out loud all at once. It is a tour de force unlike anything else you will read this year.

A Novel

FKA USA

Abigail F

“I just didn't want to see him killed." 

She gave me a long look. "That's hero enough for most people nowadays."

Before then, you see, time did not exist. I lived forever and I lived a single day only: even now, thinking back on that wordless soup, I have the idea of a moment folded in on itself infinitely, containing everything I had ever experienced up until that point … as if it all happened in a single instant.

That is the difference between being conscious and not. You start to die only when you begin to understand.

That is the true legacy of the brain Albert Cowell and his team of trained fanatics "gifted" me: loneliness that has tailed me like a shadow, growing longer and darker and heavier with time.

 but hey, like they say-hoping is the deadliest thing next to giving up hope for good.

You see, we're all of us grifters, in the end. We're just a little too small to keep sight of the real tally.

My first memory is of the quality-control dministrator who powered me awake…These were my world, my universe upon awakening, the boundaries of my being. I would have called him God, if I had understood what that meant; I would have called him Mother. 

I thrilled when he touched me, because then I knew touch. When he spoke. I  grew the power to hear. When he nudged me into movement, my body came alive.

"Bend over," he said, and I did. When he put his fingers inside of me, to sweep my cavities, to check for feel and softness, I felt nothing but surprise: that my body was complex, that portions of it were folded away where they couldn't be seen. 

My heart was full. If I had lived longer, if I had learned other words, I might have said, "I love you." 

Instead, I shifted through my programmed vocabulary and came up with the closest thing I could: "I am your whore," I said. I’ll be your whore forever.

The way this interlude comments on sex and women’s treatment is reminiscent of something else I’ve read and can’t place. 

We were made to learn, and observe, and imitate, but not to feel, or care, or understand. We were made to parrot desire while never knowing desire for ourselves. We were made to playact intimacy without esperiencing what intimacy means. We were made, above al, to be everything our makers wanted us to be, and absolutely nothing else.

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