Model Citizens

Daniel Shand

(Corsair, £16.99)

THE expectations raised by Kirkcaldy-born Daniel Shand’s first two novels, Fallow and Crocodile, are rewarded magnificently by this surprisingly affecting dystopian satire, set in a Scotland that, for all its scientific advances, feels uncomfortably close to home.

In this alternate world, the state has been abolished, its responsibilities falling into the hands of commercial interests. The most powerful man in the world is now 90-year-old tech billionaire Kim Larson, who controls an all-encompassing force called “the field”, through which passes both electricity and data, making fossil fuels redundant – although the Earth is still on the brink of an irreversible climate crisis. People, meanwhile, are obsessed with their “stats”, the constantly-updated online feedback that determines their social status, and allow the way they conduct their work and social lives to be dictated by their scores.

Planet Shand also has a group that insists on living in the past – but rather than obsessing over Churchill, the Blitz and the British Empire, the dropouts who cluster in their south Edinburgh commune want to bring back the 1990s. Calling themselves the 97ers, their battle cry is “Education, education, education” and they adopt names like Albarn, Mandelson and Creutzfeldt-Jakob, along with conspiracy theories that help the world make sense to them.

This Scotland is physically and mentally scarred by the destruction of Fife in a fiery catastrophe some years earlier, when an ethylene plant exploded. One of the few survivors was Alastair Buchanan, who was a teenager at the time and is haunted by memories of the destruction of his hometown, the deaths of his parents and his desperate race for safety.

Exactly a year ago, Alastair succumbed to the temptation to have his own “junior” made. Juniors are human copies, android duplicates programmed with the memories and personalities of their “seniors”, created basically to be servants and give their seniors easier lives.

Never referred to by any name other than “the junior”, Alastair’s duplicate is the book’s most immediately appealing character: vulnerable and self-conscious; unsure how far he can push his explorations of his individuality without offending his senior, to whom, after all, he owes his existence. Having created a copy of himself to go to the office in his stead, and not dilly-dally on the way home, Alastair has to work harder for the reader’s approval. But then his girlfriend breaks up with him, his stats plummet and his dead father – actually his dead father’s junior, as the two are virtually indistinguishable – manifests as a ghostly presence in his flat just as the 97ers are launching an assault on Kim Larson, in which Alastair Buchanan’s junior is to play an unwitting part.

There’s so much imagination in play here that it spills over into things that have no necessity for the plot to unfold, like the drone implanted with the AI of a baby and the turfing-over of the sea between the Western Isles to make them into one large land mass. But all this rich world-building constructs a framework for sharp questions about consciousness, identity and death, played out against the threat of an imminent and apocalyptic end to the comfortable, if pressured, existence Shand’s characters have grown to depend on.

Bringing to his novel the pace and restless dynamism of a thriller, the metaphysical curiosity of the best science fiction and some judiciously-planted charges of wry humour, Shand charts a steady course through Alastair’s need to come to terms with the trauma of his past and the emptiness of his acquisitive, status-obsessed present, and the junior’s exploration of himself and his responsibility to the man of whom he is essentially a copy. And his social commentary, as alluded to above, is always funny and on target.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT