2030 by Albert Brooks

St Martin's Press, 375 pages.

It's too bad that the late Michael Crichton never got to write 2030, because in his hands it might have been a great book. Crichton was a genius at marrying an epic cast of characters with complicated exposition, all wrapped into a tense dramatic scenario - look at The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park or more recently, Next. Next (reviewed elsewhere) is perhaps the closest ancestor to 2030, as both take on clinical tones to discuss the not-so-distant future. But Next ends up being far more sinister in its implications. In the hands of filmmaker Albert Brooks, 2030 actually comes across as rather benign. Perhaps it's because the author's cinematic instincts are so much more honed then his literary ones: 2030 is dialogue heavy and the narration is short, brief and always to the point. Major events - earthquakes, deaths, China buying Los Angeles - all happen in the blink of an eye without any real attention paid to the drama of the moment. The entire novel reads like a treatment for a film that never got written.



All of this is unfortunate as Mr. Brooks' vision for the future is not as far-fetched as he might have you believe. Like most satire, it only exaggerates problems that we're already beginning to face. In Mr. Brook's semi-dystopian America, the greatest threat is over-population. Cancer has been cured and most illnesses have been licked, leading to a thriving population of seniors who are hoarding both money and political influence. A backlash has resulted in acts of terrorism like the bombing of retirement homes or the hijacking of a boat full of "olds". This last event is the most exciting event of the book and given that the narrative begins with a 9.1 earthquake decimating Los Angeles, that's really saying something. Mr. Brooks would have been wiser to focus his narrative on one of these major events, which would have allowed him to explore his vast cast of characters in moments of real dramatic crisis.

Instead, he passes over these events far too quickly, as he's always headed for another scene which will allow him to discuss one of the many things happening in 2030 (health care, robots, electric cars, America's first Jewish President - well, half-Jewish). Some of it's very funny but most of it just smacks of common sense, such as the theory that America's debt will lead to foreign companies effectively owning the country. There are a few things he fails to address, such as the real problems of overpopulation - food, water and housing shortages - and he tends to give you exposition on characters you don't need to know anything about. A lot of times this slows down the narrative and 2030 could have benefited from more stringent editing.

It's also very apparent that this is Mr. Brooks' first novel and he would have been smart to consult the work of Mr. Crichton or even Harry Turtledove, another author who specializes in epic storylines and multi-character narratives. 2030 isn't necessarily a bad read but it is a slow one. Not all of the character arcs are emotionally satisfying - we follow one character for almost three hundred pages only to have him suffer the Death of the Useless Extra. As for the prose itself, its efficient without ever being interesting. Every now and then Mr. Brooks comes up with a good one-liner, but much of the book reads like an encyclopedia entry with exposition smothering whole chapters.