A Dystopic Debut

Elizabeth McClung has staked a claim and is guarding it viciously. “Every single review has implied that if you are some flower sniffing, dewy-eyed, love watching Little House on the Prairies person and you read Zed,” she writes in her blog (Screw Bronze! <elizabethmcclung.blogspot.com>), “then you will be found drooling and twitching over page 212 and spend the rest of your days in a locked ward.” McClung seems to believe that there are two kinds of people in the world: the twee and cowardly on one hand, and those brave people who can read and love Zed on the other.

McClung’s debut novel Zed is a vehicle for shocking displays. It is impelled by sheer force of bile and cynical nihilism. It sets its sights upon urban poverty, alienation, capitalism and violence and paints a dystopian image of the vicious dark side of modern post-industrial society.

Zed follows a tradition of SF (nitpickers may decide for...