Veracity
By: Laura Bynum
Published: January 2010
Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
ISBN-10: 1439123349
ISBN-13: 9781439123348
Publisher: Pocket Books
At age six, in the year 2012, Harper Adams was removed from her family, under the guise of protecting her from what was termed a global pandemic. As she grew, her psychic powers developed until she became what the government called a Sentient. Uneasy with her role as a Monitor of people's words and thoughts, she sought escape. To do so, she had her daughter Veracity placed in a new home. Free from concerns about her daughter's safety, Harper Adams makes the fateful decision to become free in word, thought, and action. Author Laura Bynum creates a frightening, yet eerily plausible distopian world, in her haunting and powerful debut novel Veracity.
Laura Bynum describes an America gone very wrong. Using the usual excuses of safety and security, the new totalitarian regime destroys the Constitution and Bill of Rights in their entirety. For what the government calls their own protection, people are implanted forcibly with a slate that monitors their speech, and punishes them for speaking forbidden Red List words. Laura Bynum understands that words are the basis for thought and ideas. Without the words to express concepts like democracy, freedom and liberty, those ideas will cease to exist. The book serves as a warning to anyone who accepts the twisting of word meanings and the silencing of dissent. When the words are gone, their meanings and ideas vanish along with them. For Laura Bynum, enforced silence is the ultimate slavery.
Laura Bynum (photo left) combines the warnings of George Orwell, expressed in his classic novel 1984 with the destruction and banning of books described in Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. Those chilling novels echo through the pages of Laura Bynum's work. As with those classic works, freedom from tyranny depends upon the courageous actions of a few dedicated people. Once the choice is made to accept death over slavery, the protagonist Harper Adams is able to act for herself, her daughter, and for society as a whole. She utilizes her gifts as a Sentient against the control of the state and its powerful technology. The author presents the view that the human spirit and its deep need to be free are more powerful than any government, technology, or their enforcers.
Through a very chillingly realistic plot, and characters who are both complex and stereotypical, Laura Bynum creates a terrifying world that is all to easy to imagine. Drawing on current events, some disturbing trends, and the very human characteristic of fear, the author presents a believable scenario of how freedom can vanish. Through fear, media manipulation, and the silencing of any opposition or freedom of speech, a totalitarian government can arise to replace representative democracy. For Harper Adams, the choice between serving that tyranny or fighting for freedom is difficult, but necessary. When she makes the choice to be free and to oppose the government, the desire is to create a better world for her daughter.
I highly recommend the important and cautionary novel Veracity by Laura Bynum, to anyone who values freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and liberty in general. The author demonstrates clearly how the illusion of security is purchased at the cost of that freedom, and in the end, there is neither freedom nor security. The novel describes how the trade off of freedom for promised safety is always a losing one, that only continues until liberty is destroyed entirely.
Read the chilling distopian novel Veracity by Laura Bynum, and learn how the courage to defend, and fight for freedom, is always preferable to the alternative of tyranny.
