2045: A Story of Our Future

2045: A Story of Our Future
Peter Siedel
New York: Prometheus Books
2009, 338 pages.

I’ll state my bias now: I’m not normally a science-fiction reader and the first few chapters of Peter Siedel’s 2045 irritated me. But the book’s main character eventually captured me, in spite (or perhaps because) of the simple way the author presented his protagonist.

Whatever your aesthetic, you should read 2045 because it paints a vivid picture of the consequences of allowing governments to continue with public policies that profit a few immense corporations. More importantly, 2045 makes it clear that now is the time to put an end to this practice.

Siedel’s world in 2045 is a corporate state in which the bulk of the population has become 21st century serfs. With a focus on one man and his family, the author shows how and why people in the future could lose control of their economic lives, and have little hope of affecting the destiny of their nation.

The book’s main character, a perky Republican named Carl Lauer, contracted a virus in 2010 that sent him into a 35-year-long hibernating sleep. In 2045, Carl awakes from this suspended animation looking much the same physically. But his wife and parents have passed away, his children are now more like siblings, and the world around him has changed enormously.

Before 2010, generations of Lauers had run a successful lumber business. But cheap prices meant that by 2045, global corporations across North America had replaced most family businesses.

The famous dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four also took place about 35 years in the future. But George Orwell’s classic differed from Seidel’s novel. Orwell was an eccentric literary genius and Nineteen Eighty-Four was regarded in the same light. It introduced readers to vast, global corporations that controlled the world. There were distant wars that no one really understood and democratic governments that had mutated into “Big Brother.” There seemed to be no separation between corporations and the democratic state, television could track people’s whereabouts, and the bulk of the population was unemployed or underemployed.

Siedel, a Cincinnati-based author and architect, doesn’t have Orwell’s quirky, predictive powers, nor his luminous literary force. But in 2045, he does something terrifying. The book shows that we’re already well on our way to aversion of Orwell’s world. If Orwell was a literary architect, Peter Seidel is a literary engineer. He surveys our present-day economic, environmental and social trends, and extends them out 35 years.

In 2045, a global environmental crisis is underway. Small cities of 150,000 people in 2010 have ballooned to two million, with the increased population mainly comprising internal refugees displaced by climate change. Crowding the streets, they cry out, “No water, no city, must move,” the mantra of the time.

Lauer is just an ordinary guy who wants to connect with his family, come to grips with what has happened to him, and find some way to get on with his life. It seems like a simple and reasonable ambition, but the odds are stacked against anyone living an “ordinary life” in 2045. Siedel’s most important message is that we are presently laying the foundations for this kind of world, and I believe he is correct.

In the name of “stimulus spending,” our governments are subsidizing the very financial and corporate forces that are responsible for the 2009 recession. Taxpayers sustain the corporate world while banks hand out billions in bonuses to those who created the problem. Meanwhile, ordinary people lose their pensions, homes and life savings. This too is the world of 2045, where the u?ber rich enjoy pharaonic wealth and the bulk of the population is destitute.

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four had no message of hope. There was no possibility of reversing the fortunes for Orwell’s hero, and his attempt to free himself failed. But 2045 does leave the reader with hope. Seidel is saying: It doesn’t have to be this way. If we prepare our cities and nations for climate change and resource shortages, we can have a future where Lauer would wake up to live an “ordinary life,” not simply survive in what little is left.

It’s because Seidel gives us a way out that 2045 is a more important book than Orwell’s famous creation. Read it. Ask your friends to read it. But be patient with the first chapters. The book will grow on you.

Clive Doucet, a writer and Ottawa city councilor, is the author of Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual.

Originally published in Alternatives Journal’s New Energy: Issue 36.1
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