Another New Book Review: Everything You Dream Is Real

Title: Everything You Dream Is Real 

Author: Lisa De Nikolits

Date: 2023

Publisher: Inanna

Length: 334 e-pages

ISBN: 2022039993X

Quote: "Admittedly, he fell in love with my avatar, not me. And admittedly, we were only together for a few months." 

But Noelle is a classic extrovert, a creature of impulse, and also a military general with steel legs. When she kicks things, they know they've been kicked. Noelle, at the beginning of this novel, wants her man back. Her man, Sharps, has been punished for multiple murders by being sent back in time and not decanted from the computer in which his consciousness is stored, so he's lying on the floor in an alternate dimension trying to figure out what happened. (Do not think too hard about what passes for science in this book. It is not Jules Verne.) Noelle dives back into the Mainframe that now runs the world, or what's left of it, to drag Sharps--kicking and screaming, because time travel turns out to be painful and he's now quite sure he doesn't like even her computer avatar any more--back into the dystopia of her own time.

Which is an impossible time. In the middle of the current century, we learn, people are obsessed with the 1980s, mainly because a lot of people in my generation consider that to have been a tacky decade. They adore all things tacky. Trying to gain control of the Mainframe, Noelle and her friends soon find themselves living in the fantasy kingdom of a 1980s plutocrat, with neon, big hair, plastic surgery, sex as commercial entertainment, and punk makeup out to there. The fantasy kingdom is occupied by a cult whose leader, Axel the plastic surgeon, funds everything by putting his clients to work in his porn business. 

All the characters who narrate chapters, in turn, are disgusted by the porn business but that doesn't stop them describing their own sexual adventures in gross detail. Noelle's attention-deficient mind is soon distracted from Sharps' disliking her when one of the porn stars (a woman) grabs her Trumpzone. Sharps has found another woman to love while his time-travelling has neutralized his violent tendencies--he's become a wimp, actually, but  his violence was probably a defense to conceal the fact that he's always been one. Sharps' mother falls in love with Axel in much the same way Noelle falls in love with the porn star. 

There's a throwaway nod to the International Union of Rich White Men Who Want To Claim Victim Status Too, which, in my opinion, does nothing for the book. The way Axel describes his evil twin sets readers up to expect that the twin, who "became a woman," is Axel's shadow personality; I don't find it credible when the twin turns up modelled on Caitlyn Jenner and everybody likes "her." These characters all liked Axel, too, but they all turned against him, and in real life I suspect even Noelle wouldn't be too fond of even a natural sister of someone who's behaved the way Axel has. But, according to all rules of fictional twins, the evil twin who's never been seen in the same place with Axel is all but required to be Axel, or at least a replicant of Axel who blew into the world through a glitch in a time-travel program. A live interactive porn broadcast run by a plastic surgeon ought to have a male-to-female sex worker around somewhere, and I could suspend disbelief in Noelle's new love being it, or Axel's old flame; it's the twin that seems so gratuitously wrong.

And so far I've not even mentioned the Revenge of the Butterflies. In this novel North Americans failed to save the monarch butterflies. Instead, they--we--the North Americans in the fictional universe with time travel--bioengineered the butterflies to survive the destruction of their habitat. The descendants of monarch butterflies now come in all the colors monarchs are not, and their size and shape are more like birds', and they're vicious. One bite usually costs the person an arm or leg. By way of compensation these no-longer-butterflies' pheromone dust is a drug that has displaced cocaine. Noelle is addicted to "butt dust," and so are some of the porn stars. 

Then there's De Nikolits' take on climate change: Canada is still cold. What's changed is that weather control technology allows humans to cut off the snow, so when Sharps and his new love Shasta are trapped in the tundra, they can't even burrow into the snow and snuggle together to get through the night. 

There are other satirical plot twists. I wouldn't even try to summarize all of them except to mention that, at a point when the plot seems about to depend on Noelle's solid steel kick, she misses. And the plot rolls on.

This may be the most hilarious science-fiction dystopia ever written, unless you count The Hitchhiker's Guide books as dystopian, which I don't think you can. If you don't mind a couple of explicit sex scenes and a continuing reminder that everyone else is doing about the same sort of thing throughout most of the book...and aunts don't mind reading that sort of thing nearly so much as we mind having it around the house where nieces and nephews can see it, or selling it in town where other people's grandparents might...prepare for a long giggle-fest. 

Double the fun? If you don't mind comedy fiction full of explicit sex, buy Tales of Tucson, which is a comically exaggerated memoir of the way things were in the 1980s, as a companion to this comically exaggerated parody of the 1980s. Tales of Tucson has a sequel (in some countries); taken together the three books should be good for enough laughter to get most people through a longer-and-messier-than-average strain of flu.