Disease and war are ravaging the Earth. A resurgent Germany is again threatening Europe and has claimed Poland as its own. The United States is mired down in yet another series of wars in the Middle East. New York’s been nuked, and everyone has fled to New Jersey, Philadelphia, and other states, including Florida.
The latter is the setting of The Human Disguise by James O’Neal, and in his vision Florida has been transformed into a police state. The effects of global warming have altered its weather; there are fewer hurricanes, but the southern part of the state is almost constantly under a cloudy sky and is cooler, around 60-70 degrees. Some districts, like the Miami Quarantine Zone, are fenced off, due to outbreaks of bioplagues and other diseases. Aliens are headed to the Earth, though they are still several years away from arriving. What’s a cop on the UPF (Unified Police Force) to do to prevent terrorists (who might be aliens that have been walking among us for centuries, or might be vampires or vampire-like beings) from getting the computer circuit boards they need to nuke the southern part of Florida and make it their new homeland?
The Human Disguise takes place, according to chapter one’s dramatic heading, “MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW.” UPF cop, Detective Tom Wilner, and his partner, the freewheeling Steve Besslia, are staking out suspected terrorists in a bar at the beginning of The Human Disguise. Gunfire erupts, but surprisingly, even though many people in what appears to be two opposing factions are repeatedly shot and/or stabbed, most of them manage to live through the violence. Exactly what and who they are and why they want the circuit boards badly enough to raise the novel’s body count to an impressive level is a puzzle that Wilner and his friends have to solve.
The Human Disguise is an action-packed glimpse of a possible dystopian future for the United States and the world, extrapolated from today’s headlines. The novel has been compared to George Orwell’s 1984, but I’m not sure why, other than Florida is a police state of sorts, and the U.S. is mired in seemingly unending warfare. There’s still freedom of a sort in the U.S., there are no “Thought Police,” and people from other countries still would like to immigrate to America, if they could, because the U.S. is at least somewhat better than living in many other countries around the world.
Despite certain things I perceive as problems with the novel, I thought it was a pretty good read, with action enough to spare. Some of the problems were some distracting sentence fragments, Nadovich’s having previously fought against America’s enemies but now deciding to turn into a domestic terrorist to establish a homeland, and the idea that the Simolits and Hallecks can survive radiation but can be killed by a stake through the heart. Then there’s the question of whether referring to the Simolits and Hallecks as “aliens” is gimmicky, or if you consider it to be cool.
If you like reading dystopian novels about grim futures, with vampires (or are they?) and aliens thrown into the mix, and reading exciting blends of the thriller and SF genres, then check out James O’Neal’s The Human Disguise today!
