So, you've survived the presidential elections. You know to "Just Don't Do It!" and that Bob Dole is a war hero from World War II. You've learned all about how bad "big government" is. And we've learned about how much we miss the '80s.

Now, this Thai import--occasional avant-garde composer, horror film director, and mildly prolific science-fiction author (http://www.primenet.com/~somtow/)--is here to bring back everything we loved about the 1980s.

Consumer culture. Conspicuous consumption. Noise, music, and decadence. The ultimate Big Government--hyperintelligent aliens watching over the solar system, locking humanity away from the stars, and providing incredible technology. The book describes the Mall of the Future: the size of a planet, and caters to every possible consumer of anything, human and alien alike. A series of smoothly-written, clever short stories, punctuated by advertisements for the wonderful products available in the mall.

Feast your eyes on the Mallworld Vampire, reduced to a sideshow at the Way-Out Suicide Club. Check out the daring youth, who refuse be decently nude like their parents are, and instead wear shapeless, indecent potato sacks. Join the Cult-of-the-Month Club. Try a dose of Levitol, and bounce off the ceiling. Forget that useless literacy, and interact with salesdroids. Live at the very center of solar commerce.

This book, published in 1984, is vaguely out of print. I found it in a used bookstore a few years ago and loved it; it seems that even this site is having some problems with it. The pages are well-leafed, passages are underlined to read to friends.

(c) 1996 Danyel Fishe

In an ever-more crowded solar system confined by alien overlords, the humans living in the rural Belt as well as urbanites all flock to Mallworld to find EVERYTHING and ANYTHING.
Mallworld is the shopping mall the size of a planet, open 24/7/365, with hordes of spree-shoppers and tourists, aliens and freaks, stair-well kids, mall workers, etc.

The characters and settings are as dark as the Twilight Zone, esoteric as William Gibson, innovative as Philip K Dick and utterly intense.

I loved every story in the book and have read it several times, recommended it to many friends (I have to loan them my copy autographed by the author himself because it is SO hard to find!).
It's a shame this book is out of print and largely unknown because it truly is a gem that needs fresh publicity.

I admit that you'll have trouble seeing this novel as the book that rekindled my faith in science fiction if you only read these next two paragraphs. The characters are mostly one-dimensional: Takahashi is the ultimate Dark Lord Foulness character, and his fate at the end is a cheat. I had to keep reminding myself that Josh Nakamura was thirty years old; he would have been a more interesting fifteen-year-old. The only interesting character, Akiro Ishida, only appears for half the book.

The plot itself leaves much to be desired; plot holes abound, and, as I said before, the villain's final fate, and the lessons learned, were incredibly unsatisfying. Not only that, but the characters think in exclamation points, and sometimes the revelations can be too obvious. So you'll have to trust me when I say that, despite the numerous flaws in narrative, Suchartikul's vision is so compelling that I'd recommend it anyway.

I always got the sense that he was busting at the seams with ideas about the tension between art and life, about beauty, about courage and honor and ecology and a dozen other things, and if he wasn't subtle enough, that's because this is a labor of love. His triumph is in a tour of a suicide colony; the mixture of the grotesque and the serene, culminating in an cruel mockery of artistry, is simply astounding, and absolves a good many literary sins on its own accord.

I understand that not everyone will be willing to ignore the book's flaws as I was, so take this for a limited recommendation (or possibly damning with faint praise). It was unique, and I derived enjoyment out of it; if you're looking for something other than the near-identical novels clogging up the Science Fiction section, you may like it too.