It is sometime in the future and the individual nations of Europe no longer exist. The EU's mission has reached its final stage in the form of the USE, with power fully centralized. This corporate-driven, closet dictatorship promotes New Democracy, its true nature hidden behind fake smiles, easy debt, and empty liberal rhetoric. With the cities run by Good Europeans, locals live as second-class citizens. But across Europe resistance groups fight back, and Britain is no different. In London, an ambitious young bureaucrat uses Suspicion software to identify threats to the USE, stumbling across a shocking murder just as a high-ranking Controller is about to arrive from Brussels. At the same time, a member of GB45 leaves one of the Free English towns in Wessex and heads towards the capital. Despite the efforts of special police unit Cool, these three men are set on a collision course. This novel imagines a system where doublespeak reigns and the internet has morphed into propaganda/surveillance tool InterZone; correctness and a denied censorship crushes free expression; physical copies of books, audio, and film are illegal; the people's culture is consistently stolen and sold back to them in distorted forms; while enforced digitization has seen history edited, deleted and rewritten. In the USE, even the most wicked individuals can be reinvented as The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler pays its respects to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. And while John King's novel provides a vision of the future, it tells us much about the troubling realities of the present day.
