Description
The Undesirables by Mary C Smith
ISBN 978-0930773472
Winner of the 1997 Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction
Un’de’sir’a’ble: n. member of the underclass composed of criminals, political dissidents, individuals with serious mental illnesses, cultists, and the children of those declared Undesirables.
The Undesirables takes place in the 22nd century in a country governed by a benign bureaucracy. But it is also a bureaucracy that does not tolerate threat–those perceived as such are psychologically “restructured” or sterilized and condemned as Undesirables. When a high government official falls in love with an Undesirable and she is murdered, the scene is set for retribution and change. The Undesirables chronicles his efforts to effect change in his society by using one bureaucratic agency against another, by allying with certain powerful people against others, by the use of naked power, and by luck.
Reviews
In the twenty-second century, earth is ostensibly a democracy ruled by plebiscites conducted on international television. The voting is actual, but true power lies with a select group of directors and an administrative council that allows only a few minor issues to reach the public. The brutal lot of the “undesirable” class and its increasing restiveness are not known by the larger public, since the undesirables have no political rights and no access to TV. Mark Grimal, a speechwriter in the administration and an unhappily married man, falls in love with a woman undesirable, and thereafter the lovers endure a campaign of terror from security forces secretly allied with the criminal drug trade. Grimal’s lover is raped, and when he finally secures treatment for her, she is given an adulterated antibiotic that kills her. Out of shock and grief, Grimal begins a guerrilla campaign against the bureaucracy that results in a plebiscite on the medical rights of undesirables, which begins, just barely, a cycle of truly democratic reforms. Smith, a retired foreign service officer, renders a brilliantly satirical portrait of a bureaucracy made of thousands of little evils whose sum is a monstrosity. This is fine, original work with an appealingly flawed central character.
—Booklist Starred Review, March 15, 1998, John Mort
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