The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Time Famine by Lance Olsen
David Seed

Lance Olsen. Time Famine. Permeable Press, 1996. 324 pp. $12.95.

The time is the twenty-first century. Lance Olsen’s America is a corporate-owned wasteland where poverty and social marginalization have provoked riots that are quickly and efficiently suppressed by private security companies. But the terrain stays dangerous. Even the White House is subject to mortar attacks. Klub Med, a huge theme park complex in southern California, suffers a massive reactor meltdown in an earthquake that releases a radioactive cloud into the atmosphere, an event the company immediately stifles by expert media management. For Olsen’s world, like that of Pynchon to which it owes an obvious debt, is a totally constructed environment traversed by different control systems. On the whole he focuses his narrative through different victims of these systems. The nuclear incident induces Chrono-Unific Deficiency Syndrome—CHRUDS for short—where subjects fall into catalepsy while they are pulled into other time periods. So a wanderer named Uly (for Ulysses) finds himself displaced into the incredible hardships of the Donner exploration party trekking through the wilds of nineteenth-century Nevada. In a world where the power of commercial technology is paramount there is no dimension to experience, not even time itself, which stays exempt from manipulation and commodification. Olsen places his novel within the dystopian tradition by depicting a space station named Erewhon One which offers to those who can afford it a cultural nostalgia for a period rather like the 1960s viewed in retrospect that never existed. It would do an injustice to this novel’s complexity to argue that Olsen lines up corporations against individuals; instead one of his minor characters insists that everything interconnects and some of the most powerful moments in the narrative occur when characters discover this connectedness. There is literally no sustainable distinction between inside and outside, as a figure called Krystal realizes when she learns that she has an electronic implant in her brain. It is no coincidence that Olsen has written a study of William Gibson because his own novel clearly connects at many points with cyberpunk fiction. His characters here and in his earlier novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist (1994) at their most minimal are not much more than animated intersections within media systems. There is a suspicion running throughout Time Famine that anonymous forces are at work in America. The Cold War may be over but information on covert government and military industrial operations runs with smooth continuity into the next century. The novel’s off-beat humor, surrealism, and strategic repetitions (with some debt here to Burroughs) all paint a bleakly powerful picture of the “Nort Amerika” (Nor-Am) to come. [David Seed]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Time Famine by Lance Olsen David Seed Lance Olsen. Time Famine. Permeable Press, 1996. 324 pp. $12.95. The time is the twenty-first century. Lance Olsen’s America is a corporate-owned wasteland where poverty and social marginalization have provoked riots that are quickly and efficiently suppressed by private security companies. But the terrain stays dangerous. Even the White House is subject to mortar attacks. Klub Med, a huge theme park complex in southern California, suffers a massive reactor meltdown in an earthquake that releases a radioactive cloud into the atmosphere, an event the company immediately stifles by expert media management. For Olsen’s world, like that of Pynchon to which it owes an obvious debt, is a totally constructed environment traversed by different control systems. On the whole he focuses his narrative through different victims of these systems. The nuclear incident induces Chrono-Unific Deficiency Syndrome—CHRUDS for short—where subjects fall into catalepsy while they are pulled into other time periods. So a wanderer named Uly (for Ulysses) finds himself displaced into the incredible hardships of the Donner exploration party trekking through the wilds of nineteenth-century Nevada. In a world where the power of commercial technology is paramount there is no dimension to experience, not even time itself, which stays exempt from manipulation and commodification. Olsen places his novel within the dystopian tradition by depicting a space station named Erewhon One which offers to those who can afford it a cultural nostalgia for a period rather like the 1960s viewed in retrospect that never existed. It would do an injustice to this novel’s complexity to argue that Olsen lines up corporations against individuals; instead one of his minor characters insists that everything interconnects and some of the most powerful moments in the narrative occur when characters discover this connectedness. There is literally no sustainable distinction between inside and outside, as a figure called Krystal realizes when she learns that she has an electronic implant in her brain. It is no coincidence that Olsen has written a study of William Gibson because his own novel clearly connects at many points with cyberpunk fiction. His characters here and in his earlier novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist (1994) at their most minimal are not much more than animated intersections within media systems. There is a suspicion running throughout Time Famine that anonymous forces are at work in America. The Cold War may be over but information on covert government and military industrial operations runs with smooth continuity into the next century. The novel’s off-beat humor, surrealism, and strategic repetitions (with some debt here to Burroughs) all paint a bleakly powerful picture of the “Nort Amerika” (Nor-Am) to come. [David Seed]

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