SFINCS 2024 Book Review

2025 by Stjepan Varesevac Cobets

2025 is a dystopian novella set in the United States. Our MC is a man by the name of Arnold Tellnord and is a family man and a professional chef. The setting involves several snippets of news sources to give updates on the back drop of the world and the conflict as large while our main character and their family reacts to the external stimuli, which is a virus.

Our family starts off rather tumultuous because Arnold decides to be selfish and get himself sick. 1/10 would not recommend, but you do you. These comments are Satire. He didn’t intend to get sick, it just happened. Anyway, he took it home, and as we all know, sharing is caring, so what other way to announce one’s love than to share a potentially deadly virus with his wife. Anyway, he’s incubated. His wife dies and his son resents him for it. A perfectly reasonable response.

This book had a strong start. The prose was good, the story initially started out as intriguing, and the character work was laid out early on, as well with intermittent world building weaved in such a way it didn’t detract or distract the plot. The latter part of the book did have a variety of issues which negatively affected my overall enjoyment of the book. However, I think I would be remissed if I didn’t mention it seems very reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”.

The one thing where this novella does shine, however, is the way it tells the story and builds the conflict at large and speculations and suspicions without inflating word count. This book is set more or less in modern day so television and the radio exists which provides an avenue for expo dumps that don’t feel like expo dumps. I thought the usage of this was quite brilliant. The prose was the strongest part of this book, and it lent itself to easy, seamless worldbuidling, which I would say is the second strongest part of the book. I won’t go into more detail because these items are closely tied together and I’ve already briefly covered it.

More of the middle of the road, however were the characters. At the beginning of the book, the characters were well established with their relationships and how they speak and even their conflicts and motivations I thought were well realized, but when you read on, there are things that are shoehorned in. It seems that way. Earlier in the book, Arnold is established as a veteran at somepoint with no elaboration on what he did. Taking into account his profession, it is not unreasonable to assume his military profession wasn’t also a chef. But there was a shootout in the latter parts of the book where he kills a bunch of people and is a cold hearted SOB. Then, oh, fantastic, he reveals he’s former special forces. This is one of a few instances where this happened and Arnold wasn’t the only character victim of such things.

If you like dysopias, and pandemics, this book MAY be for you.

Read it Here