Everyman: Be The People

Democracy hangs on the right of every adult in a country to be given the right and the means to vote. It would be easy to argue that the concept, originally developed by ancient Greeks, is fundamentally difficult to achieve - the process of providing millions of citizens with the ability to cast a vote is a logistical nightmare, as is collating and counting those votes. So it's little surprise that technology is slowly being brought into the equation to help.

Everyman takes a fictional US election that utilises technology to facilitate voting and extrapolates a conspiracy that threatens to undermine the core of democracy. In it, incumbent President Henry Birch is found to have used the technology to rig the vote in his favour. As a result an organisation called One Love, created by a writer and a scientist, springs into being to try and topple the government through direct action. It's the characters behind One Love that we follow through this book as they fight to return America to its people.

It's a grand conspiracy theory, a work of extrapolated political fiction that's more than enough to scare you into a suspicion of mixing technology and politics. But it's also a political warning, raising many questions about America, its government, the processes used to elect it and the people who get to do the voting.

The president featured in this work of fiction is a Republican who is not painted in a pretty light. Your enjoyment of it is going to be seriously hampered if you find yourself to be on the wrong side of its left-leaning politics. There are clear comparisons made between Henry Rutherford Birch and George W. Bush, from his succession to Bill Clinton to his war-mongering in Iraq.

Everyman is a cracking political drama: well plotted, scripted and realised. Although its basic premise is set in a hypothetical scenario, its left leaning politics and clear parallels with the current political climate leave plenty of things for the average thoughtful person to think about. The book should appeal to those who enjoy political drama like TV's The West Wing, doubly so if you find your politics leaning to the left of the current US political regime.

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