“The New Fed,” has taken over after D.C. is nuked. The army of American-Israeli retaliation is staffed by wrinkled boomers trying to qualify for the new end of life options, which includes a dignity pod, or subsidized old-fashioned adult diapers.

“… the boomers were not peers satisfied with their female colleagues but men that had somehow aged in body and not in spirit.”

“Civilians aren’t allowed into DigiHome Retirement Pods until the day that they are hooked up. The entire operation is to see the older generation off with dignity…”

Carter Obrock’s dark vision of a realistic near future begins by following a squad of geriatric soldiers as they squabble over rations, regularity and retirement.

I’ve never spoken with Carter. It is interesting that we have both noted the 2020 watershed of assisted dying care. Home hospice sprung out of nowhere in the U.S. at the same time that our doctors killed three million of us for their pharmacy masters and Canada set up an assisted suicide hot line for depressed women. Science-Fiction might sometimes seem like prophecy when read downstream. I am more inclined to see it as observations of current trends which are not noticed, or are noticed and denied, while the writer is working. Downstream it seems like prophecy because we have been born to the lies embraced by those who live by notion and look stridently away. Murder factories are spoken of as places of healing and rich gangsters are depicted as simple working men. Writing plain, obvious facts that pass clearly bye, places us so far outside the current narrative, that our grandchildren may very well look back over the covers of our books and see prophecy.

“What a way to find out that my aunt passed, to read it on Facebook,” says Dove as she walks by me just now. We loose a boomer every week from our circle of friends in Portland—and the herd is thinning even faster in Alaska. I don’t know how Carter knows, but he does, as is obvious in his novels Ribrunners and A Land Without Shade, that the hierarchy we are subject to, the system of control we abide by, is currently dedicated to killing as many of us, as young, as soon, and as cheaply as possible, in such a way that we do not take note. Perhaps it comes from his experience working with livestock?

A “… joint Isrаeli-American,” invasion of Iran has been partially facilitated by luring older American men to enlist in hopes of enjoying carnal companionship with pucker-lipped IDF girls. This is the kind of satire that coursed through Ribrunners and is more deeply embedded in A Land without Shade. One of the objects of the boomer brigades, was killing Islamic parents and bringing their children out of the rubble lands into the pedophile lap of that tiny state that rules Uncle Sam like its very own Golem nation…

After a brutal half-day snap-shot of life for grunts in the Middle East, the story switches to the Ozark region of Arkansas. I like how Carter places America in context first, serving its historical purpose as global force projector since Dewey steamed his fleet into Tokyo harbor about 170 years ago.

“It was sometime in early Autumn, indicated by blowing ocher leaves that clogged asphalt cracks, hiding them such that one was threatened with a broken ankle, when the lone bounty hunter lifted his electric bike for portage along a vast stretch of interstate highway beside burned down single-family homes…”

The bounty hunters back in America have been discussed by the old soldiers marooned in the Iranian desert. Now the darkly shaded world of Obrock’s imagination takes over. The youth gangs are rendered as a terrifying counterpoise to our current sterile world order. I will not give away any more of the structure or themes, but discuss one of my favorite fictional characters.

Jeremiah Seek, the bounty hunter is an excellent platform for a tour through Carter Obrock’s near future. Such an iconic American frontier character type is satirically ideal for the American back tier. An electric bike with a side car rather than a horse, is the means by which the remnants of the generation that ate the world are hunted to extinction by functionaries of the New Fed. Jeremiah, his job, his tools, his chronic use injuries already cropping up as a young man in his trade, is a real rudder in a terrible world that to us seems unreal, but through his actions has an authentic feel. I laughed out loud as Jeremiah checked for geriatric sign as he hunted the thinning herd on behalf of the new youthful order in a world that encouraged early retirement and house destruction as an inversion of the lingersome greed matrix we live in, where young married couples can barely afford rent as boomers invest in empty housing against currency inflation.

A Land without Shade presents a logical vector of decline for the American structure that was based on nothing more reasonable than a belief in perpetual, every-multiplying, economic incline. My favorite scene is towards the, a glimpse of antagonists faced with mutual survival or death spiced with a return to a form of social contract discredited in the Anglo Ethos for some thousand years now.

For posting in Moonstruck Tales #1 and the appendices of Skinnies!