Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > January Fifteenth

Normally, I’d spend much of this review delving into the social, economic, cultural, and political ramifications of Universal Basic Income, because one of the hazards (I call it perks, but I’m a weirdo) of being a Geography major is taking Economic Geography, where you end up talking about the ups and downs of UBI programs the world over: where they have been implemented, how they’ve been implemented, and the pros and cons of each country’s UBI programs. But… no offense to anyone reading this review in the future, but I’ve had just about enough of anything political as of this date after the last few days and so I’m just going to stick by the brilliant manner in which Rachel Swirsky decides to explore a theoretical United States in the future where a UBI program has been implemented and how it affects the lives of four different women from four walks of life.

Some might consider this book a novella, but it’s really not. It’s simply on the shorter side of a novel at 242 pages (novellas are 200 pages or under). I’m glad Swirsky stuck to less than 250 pages for this book, set it all within one day, and split the narrative between just four characters and how they each spend their “Windfall Day” (AKA the day when every American receives their UBI payment). Any longer and it would’ve been milking the material. This format and length keeps the book moving, keeps the material fresh and crisp with no lag time. Clever move.

I have to imagine one of the tougher parts for Swirsky was to pick the four women and their backgrounds to give us readers a diverse set of characters to see a few possible perspectives of how a UBI could affect people in the US. There’s Hannah, a single mom who’s hiding from her abusive, stalker ex-wife who always manages to find her on Windfall Day; there’s Janelle, who used to rage against the very political machines who thought up the UBI legislation even though it was evident it was skewed to (once again) give minorities and marginalized peoples the shaft but has since lost all her passion to fight; there’s Olivia, who’s a wealthy college kid who hangs out with other wealthy college kids on what other people call “Windfall Day” but they call it “Waste Day” and simply spend the day blowing all their UBI on the most absurd things they can think of; and there’s Sarah, a FLDS child-bride who’s 15 and very pregnant and may be considering leaving her husband and sister-wives after they lied to her and took her brother away late one night. In the course of one Windfall Day, all of these women see their lives changed: not because of the money the UBI brings, but because of how the UBI affects either their lives or the lives of people around them.

This book is the kind of pure speculative fiction I love, where anthropology, philosophy, thought experiments, and poignant prose come together to create entertaining and palatable prose that will linger in your brain and keep you thinking for a very long time.

Thanks to NetGalley, MacMillan-Tor/Forge, and Tordotcom for granting me early access to this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.