Vin Suprynowicz did a clever thing in crafting his sprawling new novel, The Black Arrow, set in the United States of a quarter century hence.

     No, there is no population explosion resulting in an all-Soylent-Green diet, no hurtling asteroid threatening to destroy the planet, no alien invaders from Alpha Centauri, no post-holocaust talking apes tugging at the dog collars of chained, mute humans.

     Any reader of today's newspapers can recognize the exotic source of so many of the shocking futuristic incidents littering this dystopia: today's newspapers.

     There are no clones, teleportation, ray guns, time travel or faster-than-light hyper drives in Vin's hyper-driven imagination. In the crazy futuristic world of 2030, what you do get is microchips being implanted at birth, kind of like the microchip implants being experimented with right now. What you do get is DARPA's super-surveillance software, Total Information Awareness, now fully implemented and casting a cybernet to strangle all our privacy...a scheme in fact already conceived and still being pursued on multifarious fronts, in our own world, our own reality, right now.

     In the crazy futuristic world of 2030, gun control is out of control, and a citizen can't shoot a firearm without causing a blip on the state's monitors and provoking a storm of storm troopers. To evade the monitoring, the revolutionaries use bows and arrows instead...except when they don't.

     In the crazy futuristic world of 2030, there's a checkpoint on every other corner; they're called "portals"; and no, they are not the doorway to another dimension. They are dead ends. Stumble into one, and the citizen must empty his pockets and submit to whatever the goons impose. And if what they want to do is feel up a lady's breast, or worse, there's nothing she can do about it, right? Unless, of course, the Black Arrow is lurking on a nearby rooftop, taking aim. Uh oh, I've gone and revealed the conflict of Scene One, Chapter One. Well, they always did call me a spoiler. (By the way, in "Citizen Kane," Rosebud is a sled.)

     So what's the prognosis? Are we drifting or mayhap tobogganing down a greased pole toward the screw-you-citizen future of Vin Supryn[etc.]'s fevered imagination? A future in which people can still eat and go dancing and indulge in creature comforts, in which the toilets still work (though are probably all low-flushing, except the ones smuggled in from New Columbia), and in which you can still opine as you wish in the daily paper (if you are a prominent enough journalist)?

     Because that's the other smart literary decision that went into confecting this ominous tomorrow. It is not a full-fledged totalitarian world, not quite. The benefits of the market are half-remembered and half-valued, just as they are today. Widespread lip service is given to our civil liberties, just as it is today. It's just that, in the crazy futuristic world of 2030, along with the pre-dawn raids that end up killing people for the crime of growing pot (or being suspected of growing pot), there are the mid-day raids that end up killing people for operating a daycare center without a license. In addition to the grope-and-grab at the airport, there's the grope-and-grab as you're walking down the street. In the crazy futuristic world of 2030, an over-optimistic Irwin-Schiff-type tax protester is tilting at windmills, getting slapped down in court, just as you see in Schiff scenarios of today – except that, come the revolution, the spectators don't allow it.

     The other day the local news talked about how the Transportation Security Administration is getting tougher about imposing fines of up to $10,000 on hapless passengers for packing nail clippers, scissors, or steak knives, or for even displaying the wrong attitude. The goal is to "get our attention," as the anchors cheerfully explained.

     Susan Brown Campbell told Fox News that when she inquired about appealing a $300 ticket for entering the airport with a steak knife in her carry-on, the bureaucrats were unhelpful. "The worst part was the attitude of the government officials. They scared and bullied me. I swore I would fight it, but I knuckled under at the last minute and paid it." TSA has collected millions in fines this way; without courts, without trials, without evidence of criminal intent.

     Yeah, like that could ever happen.... Vin, Vin, Vin, don't you understand that the reader must suspend disbelief if he is going to be swept up in your panoramic tale of libertarian revolution? ...Oops, uh, oh, right, it was on the news...it's going on all the time...uh....