Posted on September 10, 2008 - by admin

Considering SomeplacElse

Armageddon Meets Carl Hiaasen

By Stuart Nachbar

After finishing this story, I was reminded of a line from All in the Family: people who live in communes are communists (the small c is mine—not Archie Bunker’s). It’s not that people who choose communal living want to overthrow the government; they prefer a society where everyone shares equally in the fun and the work, and no one person prospers more than the others. And everyone must join in to protect the commune when it is attacked by outsiders who don’t understand it or consider the place to be too different to be “acceptable.” Too many wars and vocal sparring matches have been fought over communities who desired to be different and left alone to be different.

{mosimage}SomeplacElse is a communal place in Arizona, founded by Michael Allen, a formerly homeless person who was allowed to win a $200 million lottery. The community is guided by a Biblical verse, First Timothy which says: “Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophetic utterance when the elders laid their hands upon you.” After 12 years, SomeplacElse has garnered incredible wealth, not only money, but in scientific knowledge. But the community has also reached critical mass, employing 12,000 people.

Norm Larson, the main character, is a computer systems engineer who has been down on his luck in the job market for some time. He comes onto a Web site: ConsiderSE.com and is invited to take part in an extremely unique interview process. He not only gets a lift to the interview in a Prius stretch limousine, he gets to interview the company. SomeplacElse guarantees life-long employment and health care, freedom to choose projects, paid relocation, an interest-free loan, and free food and housing. This all comes at a price—a fixed salary of $20,000 a year per family member and a requirement to change tasks every 10 years. Larson not only gets hired on at SomeplacElse, he gets the top job as Advocate—because 253 people in the commune know he’ll always do the right thing!

As Larson settles in as Advocate, Adam Wainwright, car mechanic turned race car builder turned hard-partying multi-millionaire is resting on a huge lead in his campaign to become governor of Arizona. Backed by a conservative political and business cadre, Wainright goes to bat to keep a major defense contractor in the state, even as the state’s department of labor and bureau of land management have found that the company is using undocumented workers to dump toxic chemicals into the ground water. The husband of the director of the bureau of land management works at SomeplacElse, a motivation for Wainwright to call for an investigation into the “Godless hippee commune.”

The major confrontation between the forces of SomeplacElse and Wainwright takes place on Cinco De Mayo, the May 5th Mexican festival holiday. Wainwright stages a rally at the commune gates; he’ll claim that the commune is backed by Chinese money and exploits Mexican laborers and hail “free enterprise and the Christian soldiers who defend it.” However, Wainwright dies the night before the rally: he is later judged in a spiritual sense and found wanting, while Larson’s wife is badly injured trying to get through the rally. Spiritual judging is used to resolve the story, though I wished there had been a real conflict at the gates instead.

Archie Bunker was never proven wrong about communal living, though Adam Wainwright and his loose-moral friends lost in the end of this story. The ingenuity of SomeplacElse by itself makes this read worthwhile if you like utopias in your science fiction—and on that score I learned a lot from the story. I prefer a little more conflict when a utopia is under attack, but then, I’ve been accused of reading too many super hero books.

Contact Stuart Nachbar at http://www.EducatedQuest.com , a blog on education politics, policy and technology or read about his first book, The Sex Ed Chronicle, a novel on education and politics in 1980 New Jersey, at http://www.SexEdChronicles.com.