In his novel Zone 23 (SS&C Press, 483 pages) expat playwright C.J. Hopkins depicts a society, much like ours at its worse — some six or seven hundred years in the future — when any departures from prescribed ways of thinking are pathologized. Being melancholy, pondering larger philosophical questions, or contemplating the lack of fairness of the system can earn one a diagnosis of mental illness. Virtually everyone is on medication. Those who can’t be controlled by medication are deemed “Anti-Social Persons” and are removed from the society of “Normals” and relegated to various zones of abandoned and bombed-out cities, where they are eventually blown to bits by gamer-controlled drones.

Human reproduction is the central theme. That, too, has been pathologized.

Since virtually every one carries a “variant” gene that predisposes them to human-typical behavior, making babies with such genes has more or less been outlawed (or deemed socially unacceptable, same thing) thirty years or so prior to the time of the story. Instead “Normal” women interested in having children have genetically modified embryos implanted, which produce “Clarion” babies or “Clears” who do not have the typical emotions and desires that lead to “anti-social” behavior. The clears are beautiful, blue-eyed, rational, and know when to show appropriate emotions.

The plot focuses on how one “Normal” woman named Valentina, who has just had a clear embryo implanted, will eventually intersect with Tyler, a very “Anti-Social Person” in Zone 23, whose girlfriend he has impregnated via the natural way.

If only GM Clears are permitted to be born to humans, that will be the end of the human race. So the plight of Tyler’s baby is significant. Despite the fact that the plot rests on such a crucial question, the story focuses on the everyday desires and struggles of these two characters, who are not heroes, or don’t mean to be.

In this future world, all religions, ideologies, and political/social systems have been replaced by a self-help manual called The Path(s) to Prosperity. The guide employs the same sort of vapid phrases of the average Instagram life coach interior decorator, with which we’re all familiar; the Path(s) gaslights its readers into believing that everything that has happened in their lives in the result of the choices they have made. Any deity that is available to the hapless population is a bland one-size-fits-all Many-that-is-One or One-that-is-Many, depending on your particular personal preference.

Hopkins describes, in realistic detail, this disastrous generic philosophy that has come to replace all, admittedly problematic, religions and political systems. Suffice it to say that it reminds me of the sort of consumer-based “spiritualism,” pursued by San Francisco Bay Area techno-fascists these days, which we can call “toxic-positivity.” Of course, in Hopkins’ fictional world, a giant corporation controls all the workings of society and there are no more nations. People are mere consumers of content and are continually nudged to make self-adjustments to fit in with the collective soulless society. In this way, The Path(s) to Prosperity anticipates Klaus Schwab’s Stakeholder Capitalism published in 2021.

The corporate society pretends to have done away with “public rudeness, war … violence itself, all forms of aggression” and so forth. Indeed there is no “giant Orwellian boot,” but there is, Valentina senses,

a kind of dominion that controlled your MIND, and not just your thoughts, opinions and expressions, but how you perceived, and what you perceived, controlled, not you or any individual, but REALITY ITSELF.

Stylistically, Zone 23 is a witty, nasty, erudite, Pynchonesque narrative, full of fleshed-out sleazy characters and a hyper-detailed alternative world. Conspiracy theorist that she is, Valentina is comparable to Oedipa of The Crying of Lot 49 or Maxine of The Bleeding Edge — both more or less “normal” housewives, until they’re not. Valentina realizes things are not as they seem and is desperately trying to get “out” of reality.

As Valentina feels her “mental illness” getting worse, we’re told,

These fits were not full-blown psychotic episodes. They were simply extended delusions of reference, minor variations on a discordant theme, a twisted narrative her mind had created, which turned the real world upside down, not in terms of what it was, but, rather, in terms of how it worked … for, whereas now, and in all her fits, Valentina still perceived the world (i.e., the physical world) as you and I do (e.g., chairs were still chairs, cars were cars, toasters weren’t alien listening devices), her perception, or, rather, her interpretation, of societal and interpersonal relationships was disturbingly, pathologically skewed. Everywhere she looked she saw (or thought she saw) some bit, piece, evidence of some secret scheme, some deeply diabolic complot, in which, her intuition told her, everyone was implicated.

It goes without saying that ASPs like Tyler are going to tell the system to eff off. So the real character arcs of interest are those of the professionally successful and apparently contented normals, like Valentina and, even more so, her very average husband Kyle. They endure the loss of familiar comforts and financial security, as they slide into a more human existence. Unfortunately, Valentina has to go through a period of extreme psychosis, during which she does the unspeakable, as she is coming off her meds. That part was awful. I wouldn’t blame a reader for skipping a couple of pages when it comes to that bit.

Occasionally, Hopkins intrudes upon the narrative with footnotes explaining some apparently anomalous fact in the text, which I took to be his mildly ironic responses to a pedantic editor. Some of these meta-footnotes speak directly to the reader justifying some narrative strategy. I liked these notes. I can sympathize. “Look,” he writes when he pauses the main action scene, wherein Tyler is about to get blasted by a Clear gamer, to explain what kind of people Clears are. “I’m not trying to be cute or annoying…[but] we’re almost to the end of the story, … and we haven’t spent as much time as we could have on the Clears, who represent our future.., so indulge me a little…” Here, he goes on, in the main text, to explain that the Clears have no egos, no fear of death. They

were all just parts of a greater wholeness, and [their] individual lives meant nothing

Life, the way the Clarions saw it, was one big spiritual ecosystem, or holistic quasi-Spinozist organism, governed by basic free market principles, the goal of which was perpetual expansion, and the generation of unlimited abundance, and growth, and progress, and all that stuff…. Evolution was the plot of this story, because progress, growth and technological advancement were the driving forces of the spiritual economy, and the raison d’être of all existence.

Zone 23 has a place on a list of several classic dystopian novels that have taken on similar themes, but the “spiritual ecosystem” idea reminded me most of that part of E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, wherein he reveals the mind of J. P. Morgan whose perversion of transcendentalist philosophy allows him to see all lowly individuals as mere replaceable parts of the great machine, which men like himself control.

On his blog, The Consent Factory, Hopkins noted with dismay in 2020-2021 that the New Normal story was becoming true. Ordinary individualism was pathologized. Indeed, Hopkins, who lives in Berlin, has been deemed a very Anti-Social-Person by the German Courts for the thoughtcrime of understanding history and trying to warn people not to repeat the worst parts of it. His collection of essays, The Rise of the New Normal Reich is banned and he is facing a prison sentence for writing/tweeting about it. Hopkins may himself be headed for Zone Dreiundzwanzig.

V. N. Alexander, author of the still-not-published novel, Co\/iD-I984, The Musical.