Just Finished Reading Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a renowned, award-winning author of many books, going way back to the late 1960s...she is currently 81.  When I checked out her novel Hazards of Time Travel, I came to two early mistaken conclusions: one, that this was a budding writer within the genre of young adult dystopian fiction and two, that since much of the future dystopia that Adriane, the young protagonist, finds herself struggling in has been based on a drastic elimination of personal liberties following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, so it must have been written soon thereafter.  But as I stated before, Oates was already well established and the story was published just last year...

The setting is the year 2039 and what used to be the United States, Canada, and Mexico has merged into a "democracy" that in practice is a plutocracy...government by the very wealthy for their own benefit. The State uses the "threat" of impending terrorist attacks as a pretext to clamp down on free speech and inflict punishment on "traitors", that is anyone who even slightly raises any questions or doubts about the world they live in.  Adriane finds herself arrested for preparing a valedictorian high school graduation speech that asks forbidden questions and as a result is sentenced to "exile" for four years, as a college student in a small liberal arts school in Wainscotia, Wisconsin...back in the year 1959.  She is prohibited from revealing her status as an exile from the future to anyone there on penalty of being instantly vaporized...or "deleted" as they call it.  But Adriane cannot resist the temptation to search around for others who are suffering through the same exile...and here is where I leave you, the potential reader of this novel, to discover for yourself what happens.  I will say something, though, that perhaps if you're planning to read this book someday, might be construed as a plot spoiler...so potential reader, look away from the next paragraph...

After finishing Hazards of Time Travel, the ending of which was totally unexpected, I began to reflect on some possible sources of inspiration for the author in writing it...especially with regard to that problematic conclusion.  So, with SPOILER ALERT printed in capital letters, I'll just say that the movies The Matrix and Inception...especially the role of a totem in the latter...have within them elements that closely sync with the story.  There...hope you didn't read that if you planned to read the book, but I did warn you...

Oates not only wrote of a dystopia that makes a mockery of democracy and eliminates freedom of speech, but also of a society in the not-so-distant future where the racial divisions and prejudices we've been struggling against for so many years have once again became entrenched and institutionalized, even to the degree of a rigid, stratified caste system.  Maybe she thinks this is the sad direction we're heading toward now...I sure hope she's wrong.  I looked through some of the reviews on Goodreads and found that readers either loved Hazards of Time Travel or hated it...it's that kind of story...