Another Fun Romp In Cold War Paranoia!

Year of Consent

by Kendell Foster Crossen

p. 1954

Don’t be confused by the cover, which features a massive machine literally enveloping a puny human in its sinister grip. Kendell Foster Crossen’s 1954 novel about a supercomputer that runs our lives isn’t so much a straight up science fiction novel as it is a dystopic future novel. There is no computer sucking our brains out through tubes—at least not literally. False advertising, people—this is your first cold hard lesson in media manipulation, and a rather appropriate one considering the themes the novel goes on to introduce.

As I’ve stated before, I like reading books like this for a variety of reasons—seeing how accurately (or not) past writers predicted the future, and seeing what ideas developed from the intense Cold War paranoia of the time are foremost on my list. There are a lot of reasons I find these short novels tedious as well; women rarely, if at all, represent positive and influential figures—a product of the conservative era in which they were written, undoubtedly. Also, they are not very well written most of the time, and Year of Consent is sadly not an exception to this rule, but I think it’s a very important book and worth bringing to the forefront for the historical context it provides.

Year of Consent is set in 1990—36 years on from the year it was written, but for us it’s 23 years in the past. It’s always amusing to see what past ‘science fiction’ writers predicted for the future and what they failed to comprehend. Crossen’s novel sees us with self-cooking ovens that supply the food from warehouses, but it failed to predict the rise of personal computers. As a contemporary science fiction author, it’s intimidating when I look at my own work and find my predictions for science and politics woefully inadequate. The truth is we will never really know what the future holds technologically-speaking, but ideas—more often than not—hold true. This isn’t because all these authors are prescient so much as it is because ideas, and societal norms, are cyclical and people, on the whole, are pretty predictable.

Crossen’s 1990 imagines a world of four social classes—the producers (pros), the consumers (cons), the non-producers (nulls), who as I understand it, are pretty much the artists and writers who produce whatever semblance of ‘culture’ exists, and a secret class of social engineers, the people who truly have all the answers. Our narrator, Jerry Leeds, is one of these social engineers, an ‘Expeditor’ working for the government sector of Security and Consent (SAC), whose job it is to essentially root out un-American citizens. Information on consumer activities is fed into a giant computer, unofficially nicknamed Herbie, and any dissenters are captured, labeled ‘sick’ and reprogrammed to ‘appropriate’ degrees, sometimes necessitating full frontal lobotomies. We meet Jerry on Depth Interview (DI) Day, the annual day when the cameras are turned, so to speak, on the social engineers and they are forced to wear devices that monitor their every move, right down to their heart rates. Jerry is nervous, but so is everyone, so great is their paranoia that ‘Herbie’ will find something amiss in their daily routine that would cause them to be considered ‘sick.’

Jerry’s DI day routine gives us a brief overview of the world, which essentially boils down to only two major powers—the democratic Americans and the Communist Russians, with other lesser republics in between. While Crossen doesn’t hesitate to vilify Communism, he also doesn’t glorify the democracy he finds himself living in. In fact, one is almost drawn as critically as the other. Jerry identifies with a third group—the ragtag underdog known as the United Nations (Uns), a group existing primarily in Australia, the only refuge for the only sanity left in the world, apparently (In what is probably Crossen’s most glaring inaccurate view of the future, he has envisioned an Australia where everything ISN’T trying to kill you!).  On DI Day, Jerry receives orders from his totally indoctrinated boss, Roger Dillon, to capture a fugitive 'Uns' leader known as ‘Paul Revere.’ It is not a very subtle book, so you don’t even have to read past that sentence to know that Jerry has been tasked with capturing himself.

And so the adventure is set as Jerry must somehow evade his own oppressive, nosy government to protect his identity. I won’t go into the details but he is successful, though his simple-minded girlfriend Nancy finds herself lobotomized before the week is up, for merely wishing to herself that a Communist dissenter escape custody. Later on, poor Nancy a forgotten casualty, Jerry hooks up with a more spirited woman, Meg, who initially gave me some hope that she might represent her sex a little better. For a minute there, it seemed like she might break with the traditions of woman’s passive role in fiction and reveal herself to be a fellow undercover Uns, or at least an active convert who aids Jerry... but then I remembered this was 1954. I’m sure Crossen felt portraying Nancy and Meg as sympathetic victims seemed fair at the time, but in 2013 (and even in 1990), it’s a little disappointing to see women dragged around like props. It is my hope to find a science fiction novel written by a man before 1970 in which women were not merely passive participators, but I don’t suppose this was a popular viewpoint then. Hell, it’s not even acceptedthroughout science fiction today.

The social engineers don’t just capture the ‘sick’ dissenters. The SAC is also responsible for designing the culture that Herbie considers most acceptable, based on collected data. Herbie decides what the most acceptable foods are to eat, what clothes to wear, what music to listen to, and this all adds up to the quintessential American. Nobody is forbidden to go outside the norm, per se, but it is strongly discouraged, as it will all go into your profile and determine whether you qualify for a lobotomy. As a result, we end up with a culture of zombies and people afraid to be different for fear of getting noticed and labeled. Opinions may vary, but I don’t think this reflects the U.S. of today, because the 70s did a decent job of popularizing the minority opinion so that rejecting the norm is almost as popular as accepting it today, but in the fear-steeped 1950s United States where information was limited and Communism was a very palpable threat, I can see how this opinion would be one that would get into the hearts of readers.

I did find a prescient quality to the DI Day cameras and Herbie, the computer that devours all the minutiae and knows everything about you. It’s rare today when someone can exist without at least some kind of online presence. What Crossen failed to predict, though, was that while the U.S. of his making was under mandatory close surveillance of our thoughts and actions, the real population of today willingly offered up this information ourselves. For either outcome—real or fictional—however, we are the only ones to blame for allowing things to be what they’ve become. In Year of Consent, Jerry and Meg have an opportunity to escape and start a new life in Australia, but Jerry chooses to stay, knowing that his work is not done. The SAC is hellbent on introducing their latest social manipulation into mainstream—creating an unconscious correlation between their two greatest enemies through CommUNism, a word which inextricably causes people to associate the U.N. dissenters with the Communist threat. If it is allowed to come to fruition, Jerry’s sacrifices might be all for naught. It is kind of striking to realize that this ploy of the SAC’s—this stupid, baseless plan borne of ignorance and fear—is not very different from the fear mongering of networks like Fox news over the past decade. Media manipulation, it seems, is nothing new, and this is precisely why novels like this—in many ways outdated—are still relevant today.

When it’s all said and done, the greatest attack on bureaucracy is to be as individualistic as possible, social norms be damned. Jerry Leeds is at the heart of a movement encouraging people to reject what society tells you is ‘normal’ and be whomever you so desire. It’s a sentiment that serves to be both anti-Communist and anti-whatever-the-extreme-reaction-to-anti-Communism-turns-out-to-be. An important lesson in not letting your fear dictate your thoughts and actions, because extreme reactions in either direction are equally destructive. In other words, THIS IS HOW WE LET THE TERRORISTS COMMUNISTS WIN, people!