FKA USA is a wildly imaginative, funny, oddly prescient, and brilliantly futuristic dystopian tale with eerie contemporary relevance about a young man in 2085 who realises the world he lives in might be its very own Emerald City.
Reed King's amazingly audacious novel imagines a final, disastrous president of the United States, whose self-interested rule provoked the splintering of the states into individual countries. The novel follows Truckee Wallace, a young man plucked from obscurity from the factory line where he works, hand-picked by the president to lead a covert mission: to bring a talking goat to the other side of the continent and hopefully save civilisation. Along the way, he picks up an android who wants to be human and a well intentioned former convict who has had a lobotomy. As this strange foursome encounters an environmentally depleted and lawless continent, the parallels to our own times become devastatingly - and hilariously - clear.
Filled with footnotes that could be an incredible novel in their own right, FKA USA is insanely smart and brimming with social satire. A futuristic novel that is a mirror to our contemporary world, FKA USA deserves to be shelved alongside such classics as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.