Better Watch Out: A Review of ‘Vigilance’ by Robert Jackson Bennett

By Allison Wall

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‘Vigilance’ by Robert Jackson Bennet

The air is crisp. Leaves are changing, and October is almost over. Halloween approaches: the best day of the month for spooky season lovers. If you’re looking for a scary read to cap off your night of jack-o’-lanterns, candy, and costumes, check out Robert Jackson Bennett’s novella, Vigilance.

Bennett is better known for his superb work in fantasy (The Divine Cities trilogy, Foundryside), but with Vigilance (Tor, 2019), he ventures into dystopian science fiction. In the year 2030, the United States is in a state of almost total economic collapse. Most of the younger generations have fled as refugees to other safer, more stable countries. Global warming has induced massive flooding. A refusal to transition to sustainable energy has left Texas a burning oil field. And mass shootings have become so prevalent that everyone carries a gun. In fact, they are the subject of the ultra-popular reality television show Vigilance, from which the novella takes its name.

John McDean produces the show, overseeing everything from choosing a location and creating and scripting the artificial intelligence announcers, to selecting the active shooters from a pool of volunteers and directing drone shots once the very real massacre begins. But his real genius is in advertisement. McDean knows how to place ads to get his target audience to buy. Bennett writes, “from the beginning, America had always been a nation of fear.” And that suits the 1%—McDean’s bosses—just fine. They use this fear to manipulate viewers out of their money by means of his surgically precise marketing.

The America that gorges itself on gun violence is very much a man’s world. There are female characters, but none of them are in positions of authority, and none of the Vigilance operators are women. Bennett makes it fairly clear that this is America’s prejudice, not his, by giving us a dynamic, sympathetic portrayal of Delyna. She’s the daughter of a cop killed in the line of duty. Delyna is also black. As Vigilance unfolds via livestream, she struggles through her shift at a bar, dealing with racism, sexism, and explosive violence on top of the triggered trauma of losing her father.

Bennett’s story demonstrates how fear, media, advertisement, capitalism, gun violence, and prejudice work together to create a nightmare scape that feels altogether too familiar. All of these elements are already in play in 2019 America. 2030 isn’t that far off, and neither is this version of America. That’s what makes Vigilance so alarming. We’re already more than halfway there.

Dystopian fiction has a tradition of calling attention to troubling social trends by projecting their consequences into a near future. Robert Jackson Bennett’s predecessors, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Ray Bradbury, have set high standards. In Vigilance, Bennett rises to meet them. He is firing on all cylinders. His writing is snappy, and the book is tight, almost economically so. Bennett guides his readers skillfully through what could be dense technical detail, apart from his ruthless focus. Everything is structured deliberately to deliver the full impact of its horrifying vision.

One of the great ironies of Vigilance is that, even as the reality show announcers warn everyone to be vigilant, viewers ignore their own realities for the synthetic one McDean and his team create. In the same way, Bennett’s Vigilance could very well be this generation’s Fahrenheit 451. Is anyone paying attention?

We may choose to take time to enjoy the skeletons, Frankenstein monsters, and haunted houses, but when November dawns, we would be wise to remember Robert Jackson Bennett’s warning. Vigilance calls our attention back to reality, to action, lest the nightmare on the page becomes one from which there’s no escape.

– Allison Wall