Short, well written and entirely believable. ( )

After the 514th mass-shooting in 2026, someone gets a brilliant idea - why don't we make a TV show where we send the shooter in and see what happens. What about the people who happen to be where the shooter is released? Well, that's part of life - they can become victims anyway - who cares if they are victims because of a TV corporation or because a shooter chose the place on their own. Corporations agree for their venues to become part of it - they will get a cut of the profit after all and the game "Vigilance" is born - noone knows when and where it will happen - and when it happens, it is on live TV. And people die. Of course there are awards - for a shooter surviving, for someone on the ground taking down a shooter and killing instead of being killed... it's America after all. And people love it.

In 2030, the media director of Vigilance, John McDean, is about to make a decision on where it will hit this time. And while we are following him while he is preparing for the show, we get to have a look behind the scenes of the reality show (well... the deaths are very real (even if they may be reported differently if that will get more viewers) but anything else... not so much). You see - reality is boring and needs to be spiced up - plus why pay people when have AIs. Except for the dying part - there you need real people. Although if they are inconvenient, they can die and invented ones may replace them in real time... And while we get to see that, we hear about the world - most of America is burning, Europe is recovering from a hurricane, the world led by China had banned any cars using petrol and so on (except for USA that is) and there had been some kind of urban war-fare in Canada. We never get too many details - these are just mentioned in passing. But what is shown a bit better is a second story, the story of a barmaid who just wants to survive - and may not have the chance to.

And what everyone seems to forget is that if you are dealing with replaced reality, if you change what people think and see every time, you may not be the only one doing that.

Of course it sounds exaggerated - that cannot happen... right? Right? You want to read that as satire and an impossible dystopia and yet, you keep seeing things that are already happening... and it makes you wonder - is this really that exaggerated?

I suspect that the novella won't be for everyone - for one, it is very American so not sure how it will work for someone who is not dealing with the local news here, especially in the years it was written and published (2018/2019). And it will probably trigger some reactions in the American readers as well - some may feel like they are being made fun of I suspect. But it is an entertaining story -- as long as you do not try to see just how close some of it sounds like our reality. ( )

In a not too distant future, America has given in to the orgy of violence. Mass shootings are not just common, they are televised for entertainment. Most of the young and sensible have fleed far from this increasingly dilapidated country. A News corporation that puts on these mass shootings is seemingly the power in charge. The government is largely absent, fighting some far-flung war that no one is paying attention too. The citizenry are so caught up in the homespun patriotic rhetoric and staged events, they fail to notice that their world is quickly coming to an end. Even the news is too far gone to cover actual news that when China, America's number one critic, strikes it is a complete and total surprise, now completely unable to help themselves and despite the vigilant atmosphere unable to fight their own demons.

Is this an incredibly thinly veiled political commentary of a liberal bent? Sure, but it's also a fun dystopia of violence leading to its logical end. ( )

ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT.

And, though it'll never change the mind of any Second Amendment drooling asswipe, it should be required reading for all, because it speaks a lot of truths about the misnamed "Greatest Nation in the World." ( )

This reads like the love child of Network and Series 7, but it's not as clever as the former and it lacks the heart of the latter. Set in a future, dying America, the book follows a TV exec as he produces a show which turns mass murder into entertainment. I am the choir to which this book is preaching-- it's anticapitalist, and it's critical of what mass media and the country have become -- and it still left me cold. Maybe it's too calcated, or too broad even for the type of satire on display. Maybe it's that it revels so much in its descriptions of violence for a supposedly anti-gun story. Whatever it is, it all adds up to a book that never quite gelled for me. ( )