Read By: Dave Corey
From one of science fiction's greatest living writers comes an unforgettable
near-future novel in the hortatory tradition of Bradbury's Fahrenheit
451, Orwell's 1984, and Dick's A Scanner Darkly. Both a searing indictment
of a fear-drenched political climate and a visionary allegory that shines
a piercing light on timeless human verities, HARM is a powerfully compact
masterwork that is sure to be one of the most passionately discussed
books of the year.
The time is today or tomorrow - or perhaps the day after tomorrow. Paul
Fadhil Abbas Ali, a young British citizen of Muslim descent, has written
a satirical novel in which two characters joke about the assassination
of the prime minister. Arrested by agents of HARM - the Hostile Activities
Research Ministry - Paul is thrown into a nameless Abu Ghraib-like prison,
possibly located in Syria, where he is held incommunicado and brutally
interrogated by jailers to whom his Muslim heritage is itself a crime
meriting the harshest punishment. Under this sadistic regime, Paul's
personality begins to show signs of radical fragmentation. . . .
On the remote planet of Stygia, a man named Fremant, haunted by memories
of torture that seem drawn from Paul's mind, is one of a small group
of colonists struggling for survival on a harsh but weirdly beautiful
world whose dominant life-forms are insects. The sole humanoid race
on the planet has been hunted to extinction by the human settlers, whose
long journey to Stygia has left them unable to understand their own
history and technology.
Thrown back to a more primitive state, they seem destined to repeat
all the sins of the world they fled to Stygia to escape.
Is Paul dreaming Fremant as a way of escaping the horrors of his imprisonment?
Or is there a stronger - and far stranger - connection between the two
men, whose very different circumstances begin to take on uncanny parallels?-
As aspects of their identities blur and, finally, merge, astonishing
answers take shape - and profound new questions arise.
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