THE OFFICE OF MERCY
by
Ariel Djanikian
World Peace. Eternal Life. All Suffering
Ended.
THE OFFICE OF MERCY takes place three hundred years after an
intentional global catastrophe, known as the Storm. Orchestrated by a small
group of idealistic young people, the Storm was a last-ditch effort to remake
civilization—to start over—after conditions on earth had deteriorated
considerably. In that sense, the Storm was a success. Today, people live in
high-tech, mostly underground settlements, like America-Five, where everyone’s
needs are provided for. There’s no hunger, no money; and cell-replacement
programs guarantee all citizens healthy, long lives.
On the top floor of America-Five is the Office of Mercy, where
twenty-four year old Natasha Wiley works. Natasha’s job is to track and kill
the nomadic descendants of the scattering of people who survived the Storm, and
who now roam the wilderness in tribes. Most citizens consider the Office’s work
of eliminating the rampant suffering outside their walls to be the paradigm of
modern, ethical behavior. Yet Natasha harbors growing doubts. When her beloved
mentor, Jeffrey, selects her to join a special team to venture outside the
settlement, her allegiances to home, society and above all to Jeffrey suddenly
collide.
Along with a band of misfits, Natasha enacts a plan to escape the
confines of the settlement and uncover for herself the true effects of her
office’s policies. She is willing to wager her safety, her promising career
and, eventually, her faith in the values that she has worked for and believed
in all her life. THE OFFICE OF MERCY
is the thrilling debut novel
of a post-apocalyptic world for fans of The
Hunger Games.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ariel Djanikian graduated from the
University of Pennsylvania in 2004 with majors in English, chemistry, and
philosophy. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of
Michigan, and she lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with her husband.
Published by Viking
▪ $26.95
▪
On-sale date: February 25, 2013
▪ 978-0-670-02586-2
▪ 320 pages
www.arieldjanikian.com
www.us.penguingroup.com
“In this
thoughtful debut, Djanikian explores the disconnect between a utopian vision
and its dystopian implementation.” —Publishers
Weekly
A Conversation with
Ariel Djanikian
Author of THE
OFFICE OF MERCY
The
Office of Mercy takes place in a future
world set underground. What inspired you to write this story?
From the start, I knew I wanted to write
about a group of people in pursuit of eternal life. Our drive to control the
natural world and perfect human health might one day come to fruition, and I’ve
always been desperate to know what that might look like. Many lives are
healthier and longer now than they once were, so why couldn’t we eventually eradicate
disease, suffering, and unemployment—and maybe even loneliness and a sense of
purposelessness too? Of course, major changes like the one I imagined usually
come with major casualities. And the society I wrote about succeeds in its
utopian project only by abandoning the natural world and going underground—by
caring for only a few. Often books set in the future are grappling with a set
of problems that are looming in our society now, and I hope that’s true for
this novel. The struggle of how to balance a zealous devotion to technological,
cultural, and scientific advancement with the necessity of sharing resources
among billions of people is probably one of the great moral quandaries of our
time. The powerful thing about a novel is that you can take a question like
What should we do about the suffering of other people? and answer it with an
extreme. For me, this is where Natasha, Jeffrey, and the Office of Mercy came
in, and the idea took off from there.
As the book’s heroine and ethical compass, Natasha
begins to have serious doubts about America-Five and her role in this society.
We later come to understand that she is in some ways destined to question it,
yet there are others who do too. How does Natasha’s situation set her apart
from, say, Raj?
Natasha and Raj come to share the same
belief: that the moral imperative of ending suffering does not justify murder.
But yes, they come to this realization via different paths. Empathy plays a
huge part in this book. And a capacity to empathetically connect with people
outside the settlement is what allows Natasha to transcend her society’s policies.
Her own history makes this leap more possible, but she’s also a curious and
thoughtful person. Her natural inclination is to imagine deeply about other
people. Raj is a little different. He’s more concerned with the basic notion of
life and the horror of ending, by deliberate means, this mysterious and magnificent
force. The technology has progressed, but it has yet to explain human
consciousness: how crude molecules can assemble in such a way to become
self-aware. The scientific polish and smugness of America-Five doesn’t fool him
at all.
World building is a critical component in writing
sci-fi and dystopian fiction. What was your process for creating the setting
and history of America-Five?
First there has to be that moment when you
see it. For me, this happened in 2008, during a time when I was living in
Wisconsin. We were snowed in and I was looking out at the blizzard (one of the
many we had that winter), when I had a vision of the Dome and the underground
levels, set against a sun-drenched forest. The rest of the landscape and settlement
came into being as the story demanded. For instance, there needed to be a lab
to grow the replacement organs, a farm for food, a nursery for the new
generation. The history of America-Five I sketched out very early on into
writing the book. The details did change as the novel took form. But that can
be fun too—getting all the pieces to fit together. Kind of like creating a
puzzle and solving it at the same time.
In many dystopian books the natural landscape as we
know it is destroyed, so it’s interesting that in this novel there’s a wild and
thriving forest outside of the high-tech environs of America-Five. Can you talk
about the interplay of these two parallel spaces?
Absolutely. As I said, this is the key
image that drew me into the world: the glimmering Dome peeking out from a lush,
dense forest. For most of the novel, a strict divide persists between the two spaces—and
that’s exactly how the citizens want it. Their goal is to be self-contained and
self-sufficient. Nature is barbaric; it demands the mortality of the individual.
The citizens want no part in the chaos and unpredictability of an environment
that eludes their control. They have basically turned their backs on the universe—and
on God and on history too, for that matter. When the separation between the
inside and outside begins to break down, death can creep into the citizens’
home.
How did you choose the central values (World Peace,
Eternal Life, and All Suffering Ended) for America-Five? What in your view
makes them problematic?
I couldn’t think of three bigger, better
goals for a society to shoot for. In one sense, to realize them would be to
realize a true paradise. The catch, of course, is that general values like
these can be easily turned on their heads. The citizens of America-Five have
achieved world peace by creating the Storm, they possess eternal life in part
because other people have no life, and they have ended suffering by
annihilating—not suffering itself—but the people who suffer. I liked this
inherent duplicity. The values sound good at first, but clearly, it’s the how
that matters.
The society you describe is strict in many ways but surprisingly
lenient in others—Raj and his group seem to be able to meet and talk fairly
freely, and people meet for illicit couplings without punishment. How did you
decide which behaviors would be allowed or tolerated?
The leaders of this society, the Alphas,
have trained their citizens to believe that they are all living in a
near-to-best possible world. In many ways, the Alphas see history as having
ended with them—a fact that pleases them immensely. Their inability to
anticipate any serious disruption to the social fabric is what makes them so
lenient when it comes to free speech and small indiscretions in civic life. It
was clear to me, though, that they would not tolerate threats of violence,
which is where the story eventually leads.
With all of the technology at their disposal, the
citizens of America-Five are still human and subject to emotional whims and
disturbing dreams. How would you envision this society dealing with these
problems in the future?
I’m not sure that they would drastically
change their policies. This society believes itself to be humanistic and
enlightened. They have too much pride to stoop to extreme measures of
punishment or brainwashing. Dreams and whims are a terrifying and inevitable
part of the mind, and I don’t think that any technological enhancement can free
us from them. Having said that, I’d bet the citizens would consider redesigning
the shared-memory capabilities of their entertainment space, the Pretends.
This book could be shelved as sci-fi, urban fantasy,
or dystopian. How would you characterize it? Did you have a strong sense of
genre when you began writing, and how, if at all, did that change as the drafts
progressed?
I knew I wanted the big, blank canvas that
a book set in the future provides. Once I got going, though, the finer points
of genre classifications did not really factor into my process. More important
were the many authors whose books make up a web of stories and traditions that
I wanted this novel to fit within: George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret
Atwood, Orson Scott Card, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, and Kazuo
Ishiguro, to name just a few. As for the
first part of the question, I think any of those categories could apply.
One of the most compelling aspects of this book is the
way you play with the reader’s expectations as we see the narrative through
Natasha’s eyes. How did your own sympathies evolve over the course of writing
the book?
The book stays close to Natasha’s
experience, so for the most part I was trying to stay faithful to her perspective
and allow my sensibilities to follow hers. That was dynamic work on its own,
given that she’s someone who changes her mind when presented with convincing
evidence; and that she’s willing to enter the fray and make tough decisions,
rather than watch from the sidelines. More broadly, though, my sympathies needed
to shift around a great deal in order to create groups of people in conflict
with one another. I hope that’s one of the novel’s draws: how questions like
What can we do to stop the suffering of other people? can be answered
differently, and convincingly, by individuals each claiming the moral high
ground.
What can readers expect from you in the future?
I’m working on a prequel to The Office of Mercy, the story of the
Alphas who created the Storm. Ever since I started writing about this world, I’ve
been imagining what led them to do something so severe and so final.
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