FKA USA
by Reed King

FKA USA is a wild postapocalyptic road trip across a fractured USA that channels a mashup of The Wizard of Oz and Candide with commentary from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide on the side. In some ways, this is a future familiar to us from the cyberpunk of the 80s, but with the futures foretold in those stories getting closer every day, Reed King has taken a fresh look at now and then and come up with an unforgettable tale. I only wish we could send it back in time to blow their minds.

Truckee Wallace is a nobody working in a factory in a corporate city-state, pressing a button all day long and in debt to the company store. Thing is, he’s okay with that. He’s 16, got a job, two and a half friends, one being an android (they only count for 48.5%), and maybe he’ll even get to kiss a girl someday. He doesn’t count on being a hero, and that messes everything up for him when he finds himself running towards the man on the catwalk who looks very much like he’s going to toss a goat into a vat of chemicals that will result in a very big bang.

Well, at least he tried.

Truckee survives the explosion, and so does the goat, since it was the man, riddled with bullets, that took the dive. Not just any man, either. It was Billy Ray, who’d been almost a father to Truckee, who’d given him two real books, one of them the FKA USA Grifter’s Guide, a collection of everything you’d need to know to make it across the fractured American landscape now divided into countries and corporate city-states. Which nobody in their right mind would want to do, except that President Burnham, son of the last president of the actual United States, wants Truckee to do just that, and take his little goat too.

The little talking goat, Barnaby, who ate his way through a library, reading as he went. Who has 40% human brain transplanted into his skull, and it happens to be brain cloned from Rafikov, the neuroscientist that went insane trying to solve mortality, and is now turning vast hordes into zombies tied into her own brain through computer networks and with the help of a drug called ‘jump.’

The goat is the key to stopping her, but there are several problems with that. The only lab that can make use of its brain cells to engineer a counter to jump is in San Francisco, and Truckee is in what used to be Arkansas. Less problematic is that harvesting the brain cells will kill Barnaby, but hey, he’s an old goat.

So off across a Gulliver’s Travels worth of countries Truckee goes, acquiring a Wizard of Oz’s crew of companions, including a Straw Man (a lobotomized Texan and Grifter), a Tin Man (or gal, as the it happens), and a cowardly goat (who could also be Toto in this cast.) There’s even a Yellow Brick Road, but it won’t get you anywhere since it’s a virtual space on the dark web.

The, ending, when it comes, is at once twisty, satisfying, and at 480 pages, it takes a while to arrive, but that’s a good thing. The chapters tend to be short and episodic, full of interesting new things to see while the plot drives inexorably towards its rendezvous with Barnaby’s destiny. Or maybe Truckee’s. Or maybe ours. The short chapters have some of the same effect short stories on me. After I finished one rather than rush on to the next I wanted to stop and let it sink in before moving on down the road with our motley crew. I’m pretty sure that’s by design, by the author and it works for me.

Post-Apocalyptic fiction is always more about the present than the future. On the map of the undiscovered country, it’s the bold type that says, “Here there be dragons, the edge of the Earth, and not the droids you’re looking for.”  And that legend is right next to the crosshairs that are marked, “You are here.”

Stepping over the border into that country, just to take a peek is irresistible.  The hard part is crossing back to where you were beforehand, blissfully unaware of the things to come. It’s kind of like New Jersey. You can leave New York City for free, but you have to pay to get back in.

FKA USA is that kind of cautionary tale, and from the first sentence, “You’re sixteen going on sixty Truckee, my mom liked to say, giving me a cuff. Too smart for your own good, least where your brain’s not plugged into the feeds.” You’ll be mired in the fractured post-United States of the 2080s.

Highly Recommended.

From Publisher:  Reed King’s amazingly audacious novel is something of a cross between L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, Douglas Adams’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

In Reed King’s wildly imaginative and possibly prescient debut, the United States has dissolved in the wake of environmental disasters and the catastrophic policies of its final president.

It is 2085, and Truckee Wallace, a factory worker in Crunchtown 407 (formerly Little Rock, Arkansas, before the secessions), has no grand ambitions besides maybe, possibly, losing his virginity someday.

But when Truckee is thrust unexpectedly into the spotlight he is tapped by the President for a sensitive political mission: to deliver a talking goat across the continent. The fate of the world depends upon it.

The problem is—Truckee’s not sure it’s worth it.

Joined on the road by an android who wants to be human and a former convict lobotomized in Texas, Truckee will navigate an environmentally depleted and lawless continent with devastating—and hilarious—parallels to our own, dodging body pickers and Elvis-worshippers and logo girls, body subbers, and VR addicts.

Elvis-willing, he may even lose his virginity.

FKA USA is the epic novel we’ve all been waiting for about the American end of times, with its unavoidable sense of being on the wrong end of the roller coaster ride. It is a masterwork of ambition, humor, and satire with the power to make us cry, despair, and laugh out loud all at once. It is a tour de force unlike anything else you will read this year.