Model Citizens
Model Citizens
Daniel Shand
Set in a near-future dystopian Scotland, Model Citizens’ deft world-building could convince you Shand has glimpsed a parallel present. Climate collapse is assumed to be unstoppable. Governments across the world have abdicated responsibility in favour of corporations. Everyone and everything is connected to The Field, an all-pervasive energy source, media network, and panopticon which can influence anything from job promotions to family ties. The only aspect of Model Citizens that feels truly sci-fi is Shand’s central conceit: mechanical clones called juniors, replicas of their owners, working jobs nobody wants to work, attending events everyone wants to skip.
It’s against this believable nightmare we meet the work-shy Alistair, his painfully self-aware junior, and his ambitious ex-girlfriend Caitlyn. They make for a nervous trio, obsessed with presenting a respectable image at odds with their needs, and soon become tangled in a plot against the status quo. The 97ers, a renegade cult who pine for the lost heydays of New Labour, Princess Di and the Happy Mondays, plan to take down the genius behind the Field and the Juniors, Kim Larson. A clear lampoon of neoliberal tech billionaires such as Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos, Larson’s own vision for humanity is equally unhinged.
Trapped between these extremes of idealism, Shand’s protagonists ask difficult questions of abandonment and commitment, without providing any clean answers. It’s a testament to Shand’s skill that their various neuroses endear rather than irritate, evidently the product of their soul-crushing environment. But by readily embracing a life of dehumanising convenience, they inhabit a void of collective irresponsibility that is partly a creation of their own apathy.
The 97ers’ poisoned nostalgia is less nuanced than the consumerist paranoia they rail against, which scuppers the relatable belief we could build a better future, if we could identify what went wrong in the past. Led by a trio of twitchy thugs who’d be more at home in a tartan noir than a sci-fi, the cult more often operates as violent comic relief, but also as a real driving force who ensure the plot’s pace never slackens. Nobody with agency seems interested in cleaning up the mess except Larson, who could easily have been written as a two-dimensional villain. Instead Shand contextualises his maniacal streak, revealing a man twisted by a lifetime of negligence into a desperate egoist who thinks he can save the world from itself. Easily the strangest character in a book full of strange characters, his dance with hubristic folly makes for a bleak thrill.
An entertaining, callous farce, defined by bleak humour and a lack of heroism, Model Citizens is not so much a prescient warning of a dystopia to come, but rather a furious eulogy for a narrowly-dodged utopia.
—Ryan Vance