Flet

"Flet" is set in a spaced-out, delimited future in which all cities have been evacuated after an "Emergency," and is named for its quiescent-but-full-of-agency female protagonist. Flet is an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the oft-invoked Emergency, after which all public spaces are off-limits, is a tool of sociopolitical manipulation, if not oppression: the decentralized citizenry binge on endless, aimless filetape transmissions drained into their homes. A face-off between this tentative muckraker and her icy superior is set to go down at a mandatory, nationwide Reenactment, in advance of which Flet finds herself dreaming and driving endlessly off the map. Will she find the missing cities, or will she lose herself in the flood-tide of images that wash over the Nation?An elegant entry in the field of speculative fiction, "Flet" finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination and syntax down to the speed of narrative.