The best speculative fiction gives us the distance to see our own world more clearly. Take Scott Guild’s debut novel Plastic. Most of its characters are just that, figurines, although others are waffles, or robots, or hairy shipping boxes with whirring propellers as means of locomotion. But their post-nuclear-war world is a nightmare of rampant consumerism, life lived virtually, and the ever-present anxiety over random terror attacks from groups trying to wake up the drugged-to-complacency citizenry to its own environmental destruction, in the book called the Heat Leap. It doesn’t take much for our humanity to be stirred by these unusual characters’ plights.
Did I mention when the characters converse, they do so in a quick cut new language? At one point, history is described by a person explaining why not to study it: “War war war. Kill kill kill.” And here’s how a match from the phone app Hot Date attempts to comfort our heroine Erin early in the book: “It okay feel bad, he says. No need embarrass. I get — I get total. Life just…creaky, no? So tough sometime.”
Tough isn’t a strong enough word for what Erin goes through. That Guild’s downbeat plot machinations don’t wear the reader out is a testament to how much his protagonist — a real doll — ends up miserably, hopefully human. Plastic provides many clever ways to help us feel Erin’s struggle, narrative tricks that are well earned and that I don’t want to give away in a review. Just be prepared for anything and everything to happen, and then to be read in a very different light a few more chapters in, from scenes from what at first seems to be just a goofy TV show, Nuclear Family, to actual musical numbers — that mention of Sondheim early on will go off like Chekhov’s pistol in a later act of the novel. Indeed, Guild had a career as a musician in the band New Collisions (who toured with Blondie and the B-52s) prior to his move to writing, and you can even download a parallel album of Plastic, a collaboration with the artist Cindertalk, if you care.