Numbercaste - Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

"And I believe

These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Don't cry"

      ( "The Boy in the Bubble" - Paul Simon; from Graceland ) 

     Paul Simon sang this back in 1986. Hell ! That was 32 years back. Although "the days" that he mentioned are now "ancient" at the rate that change is "happening", one gets the drift of Simon was singing about. For, this is the single track that started playing in mind, as I switched off the Kindle. ( Probably a out of date one I confess, given that I don't dig modern hip-hop)

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne won the Vitural FantasyCon award for the best HardSciFi novel, for this book. And get this ? Reading this, it didn't quite feel science fiction. The turn of events plotted here, and rolling at a pace in sync' with the times, doesn't quite sound too distant and impossible. While am tempted to call this a modern 1984, it doesn't quite fit the bill. 

For several reasons:

- Numbercaste is about possible events in another 12-22 years; that's not quite that far ( in contrast 35 years separated 1984, from its year of publication, 1949 ); and the predictions aren't quite far fetched. A smaller version with limited scope of the system is already in Beta version, in certain parts of the world, we are told.

- While 1984 is necessarily Dystopian, Numbercaste isn't - well, not quite. With the twenty first century and on wards, modern society's tolerance of bigotry has declined to minuscule levels. So much so that it is at times laughable - like the time when Kendrick Lamar stopped a fan  in the audience saying the N-word; but she was singing along to his own lyrics ! The height of absurdity !! But I digress. 

The book is about "The Number". What is the number ?

“This is the Number. It is in the things we do, the people we meet, the ID cards that we carry. It's part of our identities, our credit cards, our social interactions. It takes our influences, our biases, morals, lifestyles and turns them into a massive alternate reality that no-one can escape from. It lives on our phones, in our televisions, in the cards we swipe to enter office. At its best, it’s an exact mirror of how human society actually works - all our greatness, all our petty shallowness, all our small talk and social contacts all codified and reduced and made plain. At its worst, it’s also exactly that. It’s how poor and rich and famous and desirable you are. It’s the backchannel given a name and dragged out into the limelight for everyone to see.

It's a state George Orwell would kill to see”  

                            Well, yes, and No. Exactly my point. Orwell would be disappointed, but if his  grand child had a similar expectation, with her modern ideals, then, yes, she would kill. Let's face it, the rate of change since the early nineties, is much more than possibly the thirty years before that.

Our protagonist is Patrick Udo. A marketeer, or rather a story teller (if am to use the big data parlance ), for NumberCorp.  He relates the story and the journey as he lived it, in Numbercorp, once he was out of it. The Number is destined to be the single factor which determines a human's value, in economic, social, political domains - it is the story, of how this happens that is told here. As with most modern companies, the  cruel perseverance is displayed, as NumberCorp is determined to bulldoze everything on its way. 

"If someone ever tell you that big companies control the media, believe them. We don't control everything you read, but we control everything you don't see."

In essence if oil was black Gold, data is the invisible Gold. And this book, although a work of fiction, tells us why. . Am not particularly a science fiction fan, and for me this didn't quite ring "science fiction", say 100%. Probably why I enjoyed it that much.

In conclusion, It is a narration of a futurism, that is a work of fiction, but quite believably so.  I won't be much surprised if Yudhanjaya  Wijeratne  is proven to be correct in a few decades to come.

And until such time, keep writing Yudhanjaya, while you keep crunching your data. We the reader, await, your next book!