Omschrijving
In an uncannily prescient novel eerily relevant to our
contemporary political moment, Undercity charts the
lives of two dozen characters desperately trying to
survive and retain their humanity in a civil order that
has tumbled into totalitarianism.
Once there was a republic of boundless wonder and achievement whose bright horizon had gone dark, soiled by a populace it
imagined as undisciplined, unhealthy, feebleminded, and whose
very existence stained and subverted a great society. A solution
appeared in the furious logic of Biological Dominion that named the
ineffectual and weak, the criminally deformed and unwell, as the
root cause of this decline. Now, imagine laws conceived in the high
halls of government to rid this society of millions deemed infected
by a curious disease supposedly responsible for that poverty of
health and morality. Next, imagine those millions considered to
be unfit and unworthy for daily life loaded onto freight trains and
ushered away to perish in distant woods and fields. Imagine more thousands chased into the vast underground of labyrinthine caves and dark
catacombs beneath vibrant city streets and lovely city parks to wither
away and die.
Undercity collects the voices of brave survivors, of those who’ve
refused to submit to the indignities of eugenical persecution, the horror
of gas chambers, and relentless warfare in rural provinces. Some of
these stories demonstrate the moral disaster of eugenics, while others tell of courage and love and that indomitable magic of the human
spirit that refuses to be silenced in the face of unspeakable crimes.
Perhaps Undercity is a warning to us, as well, that what we might think
is unimaginable needs only apathy and inattention to arise.