Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment

One of the things I love about speculative fiction is that it starts from an idea of something that could be, and explores where that could go. As a reader you accompany the writer through their though process and discover the possible consequences of that initial idea. Radicalized starts from a set of key messages that are part of the canon of the current mainstream ideological and political stance in one part of the globe and feels like it has to build a world and a plot that can serve the message, rather than the other way around.

Very shortly summarised :
- Big corporations are bad and xenophobic
- The Police and a lot of people in an entire country are racists
- Big Pharma and the government want to let people die
- The 1-percenters are too selfish to help others and too stubborn to be helped by the nice immigrants

As a foreign observer of the current American culture and socio-political situation I can (with all the limitation of any external viewpoint) see where this is coming from and I sympathise with the objectives. But as an enjoyer of speculative fiction it feels like the pandering to a specific crowd at a specific moment in time is a tad too heavy-handed. I wonder if this books will make any sense to anyone in 10, 20 or 30 years time, as some other books from 50 or 100 years ago still manage to do.