Surveillance

You have been warned. First, David Butterfield has excoriated Cambridge University in these pages, leaving its standing devalued. Now Julian Stannard, a poet and novelist, delivers in fiction a devastating evisceration of other current universities. The University of Bliss belies its title. This is a work of high satire and Stannard vents his frustration with more than a touch of Swiftian saeva indignatio. His ridicule is extreme and addictively readable. The novel follows the career of the newly appointed vice chancellor Gladys Nirvana, partial to foot massages which transport her to regions signalled by her surname and give her acute sexual gratification. She is a renegade academic turned administrator, self-serving,

Imagine a society, a high-minded psychologist tells his curmudgeonly father, ‘in which people are like cars. They have to go in for inspection once a year’ in order to assess their emotional fitness for the shared highway of life. As for the ‘psychopathic percentage’ whose ‘moral disorders’ lead them to fail this spiritual MoT, never fear: state-funded therapy will get them on the road again. And should they refuse? Surely, as we learn later in The Mark, everyone longs to stand ‘on the right side of history’. The Nordic dream of close-knit, high-trust, mutually supportive welfare societies has always had its internal critics: mavericks, naysayers and backsliders, who prize autonomy

The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film based on it. Here was a vision of a shudderingly paranoiac technological dystopia in which you could be arrested for something you haven’t even done yet. Not so science-fictional as all that. ‘Pre-criminal’ is the phrase — apparently one in official currency — that’s used of the protagonist of the story with which Darren Byler begins his chilling short book. Vera Zhou was a student of Byler’s at the University of Washington. A member of the Chinese Muslim Hui population, she was walking through a crowded street in her home