The dark world of Mia and the Mirror City

‘Stepping out of the norm can be a death sentence. They fear what we have inside.’ From The Mirror by Tim Bragg.

The reversed image in a mirror is a metaphor most apt for the reversal of values and social norms under Orwellian totalitarianism.

Today, it seems to me, we’re surrounded by a Big Brother infrastructure built up in recent years by technocratic ideologues and now primed for activation — the seeds of digital enslavement have been sown.

Tim Bragg, in his new novel The Mirror (Sycamore Dystopia, August, 2023), writing in the long and vigorous tradition of dystopian fiction, extrapolates this insidious potential fifty years into the future, to 2073, in a meticulous imagining of a soulless technocratic state.

I wonder if Tim was tempted to set his novel a little later in 2084!

Look into this mirror, this darkling glass, and we see the image of a frightening future — what the Western world could be like unless its present course is deflected and its freedoms preserved.

We find ‘supercities’ divorced from the natural world, rampant AI, transhumanist programmes with experiments into ‘migrating’ consciousness into machines, a society shared with mechanical-biological hybrids which, resembling humans so closely it’s hard to tell the difference…