Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > Intrusion

Story set in the near future - a world transformed by bio-tech and computing power but subject in the free world to a high level of police surveillance and control. Individual rights (e.g. women's rights) have been subsumed into the rights of society to make the right choices for people (with in particular control of pregnancy and even pre-pregnancy effectively turning women back into domestic slaves with intrusive monitoring of their health and lifestyle choices) and free market doctrines replaced by a doctrine of society deciding the choice people would make if they were fully informed and acting rationally.

Hope is pregnant with her second child and (as with the first) refuses to take the fix, a pill which effectively corrects any genetic defects in a baby including conferring immunity from most infections. A recent legal case means that this, without a faith objection which the militantly atheist Hope refuses to claim, is close to illegal. Her case is taken up by a journalist and social campaigner and this starts to trigger police surveillance and this together with her refusal to take the fix (but never explicitly due to that) leads her to fear she will be declared an unfit mother and flee with her husband to his Scottish Island home. Her husband (and his father and their young son) all have a form of second sight which over the story seems to be linked with some form of tachyon particles travelling back in time to which they are genetically disposed to be sensitive.

The family are pursued by police and nearly escape into a strange parallel (or more likely future) world her husband saw as a boy - he decides not to flee to it (not least as Hope can't see it) but does thrown an illegal gun he has there - possession of this has he and Hope arrested and interrogated on terrorism charges, only to be released when his father discovers the gun in his house, presumably having retrieved it from the other land.

In many ways a very interesting story - with an interesting take on a logical extension of a combination of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness policies and a convincing geo-political future. It also conveys very well what happens when ordinary people get caught up in anti-terrorist actions and the police state. The second sight story line becomes increasingly dominant and largely ruins the story and there are some crucial illogicalities (why was his father not monitored when he retrieved the gun and most crucially why in the future world is reproduction not asexual or at least artificially engendered).