Review: Erase Me (Positron #3) by Margaret Atwood

Erase Me by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the third installment of the Positron serial story by Margaret Atwood. I'm told there's supposed to be another, but I haven't found any solid details, so I'm left just crossing my fingers. While this was a good episode of an overall serial, it felt incomplete.

This episode has Stan returning to the Consilience prison, where people struggling with crippling debt have sold themselves into a lifetime of living for one month in prison, one month with the illusion of freedom in a gated, self-sustaining community, throughout the year. Stan has found a loophole. Or, rather, his captor has. She works for security, and she's disillusioned with the system. So she's going to free Stan entirely by making it look like he died. At the hands of his cheating wife.

Stan has a good amount of uncertainty in the plan, and Charmaine's heartfelt breakdown over what she has to do is memorable. We're very much with Stan and Charmaine in this installment, where before readers might have felt distanced from their activities.

The parallels to 1984 seem a lot more pronounced in this installment than in the last two. Even some of the language spouted by the spokesman for Positron sounds Big Brotherly.

I hope there's more to the story. Because, while this does resolve the immediate conflict in a satisfying way, I still have a lot of questions about the overall picture. I'll be watching for news of another planned installment.


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