Coffee Spew

Book critic Stephanie Bedford in The Capital Times (week of Jan. 4-10) pens some wonderfully trenchant remarks about Rod Clark’s Redshift: Greenstreem (now a CBR Press ebook):

Cambridge’s CBR Press has just reissued the short, punchy and funny sci-fi “micro-novel” Redshift: Greenstreem by Cambridge resident Rod Clark. First published in 2000, it’s an unapologetically geeky piece of futuristic sci-fi set in 2093 Los Angeles, in a world where what we quaintly refer to as “the 99 percent” have been enslaved by debt and inflation. These consumer drones inhabit “Redshift,” an area where their whimsical desires, fanned by a constant stream of advertising, can be transformed against their will into binding agreements to purchase. Redshift presents a satirically exaggerated dystopia, but one that pointedly resembles our own here and now. Wonky appendices hark back to other sci-fi classics like 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, but Redshift is more intent—if only slightly—on tickling your funnybone than giving you nightmares.