Dr. Bizarro’s Bookshelf of Horrors

The Girl Who Owned A City: Lord of the Freaks

Many of you humans seem to have some odd fascination with the end. I don't just mean moronic goths (as redundant as that sounds) or emo kids, but a trend in a lot of your fiction. Being the death-obsessed morons that you are, you've always been focusing on the end of your wretched species in fiction. From apocalyptic religious texts to science fiction novels, your obsession with the end of civilization seems to only be matched by your obsession with “hubris.” Not that the latter is an especially bad thing. Without ambition, your “civilization” (a term I use loosely) would be banging rocks together in a cave.

A common theme in almost all of your primitive philosophical and cultural systems is your hypocritical “regret” of progress and “human arrogance.” Despite being ill-defined concepts and popular cliches, rarely do we get the other view: that human progress and drive can be a good thing. As much as I hate to compliment your primitive species, without your drive, you would not have made the technologies that make an evil undead cyborg such as myself possible.

There are few of your philosophers who try to back the pro-human side of things, but they often fall prey to dogmas as strange as your religions: Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, and so on. Of these, I will say at least the ones who say the what an individual gets shouldn't be determined by their relations, race, or similar superficial factors. (You all bleed the same, after all.) Of the self-centered writers, no meat-sack human can beat Ayn Rand. While her philosophy of Objectivism at first seems like a form of minarchist libertarianism, she personally acted like it was some inflexible form of religious dogma. In terms of themes, her thick, shoddily written books are better reading than many philosophical alternatives, and double as the best door-stoppers money can buy.

What if instead of just teenagers and young adults, we could introduce this philosophy to an even younger demographic? Yes, that is correct: an attempt to show true sociopaths even more reasons to be selfish. (Of all the types of sociopaths, the amorality of children chills even me.) In 1975, OT Nelson published a book with that very intent. This book is today's experiment: “The Girl Who Owned a City.” I must say, this is probably the first book I read of any significant length, back when I was a pathetic sack of organs in third grade. This load of hypocritical propaganda is thankfully better than many other options, such as that Christian mind control attempt known as “Veggie Tales,” or the surrealistic nightmare that is the Teletubbies. So, let's dive into what happens when you let Ayn Rand run a daycare.

It starts off with a virus that kills everyone older than twelve in the space of a month. Yes, you read that right. For a young adults book, they just had to make it a post-apocalyptic one. It starts off with a disease killing everyone in the world over age twelve in a matter of weeks. Yes, that is correct. Despite being written in the 1970s, a month or so seems an awfully short time for a doomsday plague to infect every person over twelve on the planet. Despite how geographically and politically isolated certain nations are today (let alone in the 70s), the disease spreads across the globe.

However, with any disease, there is normally a percentage of the population naturally immune to it (however small it would be). However, we do not see any adults or teenagers here. Just a bunch of children, scavenging the ruins. Now it is possible some teenagers and adults survive in remote areas or regions, but I doubt the writer took that into account. The reasons for the immunity of the whining brats is also unlikely, but hey, science marches on.

Now, at this age, most children still depend on their parents for most things. Once mommy and daddy are compost, most kids barely have the skills to survive a weekend camping, let alone the rest of their lives without parents. Despite this, we have a protagonist who is clever (a bit too clever) for her age: Lisa Nelson. (Same last name as the author, interestingly enough...) She and her younger brother Todd are scavenging, like several other children, from abandoned stores and homes. There are also plenty of abandoned cars, but strangely, Lisa is the first person to think of driving one. She also becomes the first to realize that the food in the stores originally came from warehouses. With stores having already been looted, she figures if they can find one of these food warehouses, they'll be all set with food.

She finds one, and needs help taking it back home. So, she enlists the help of a boy her age, but makes it clear that despite needing someone to move the food, it's all hers. Now, this Objectivist idea is meant to show property rights and all. But considering the entire free market went down the tubes with the virus, scavenging and looting what someone else produced is a-okay. The Objectivist idea of capitalism as a coercion free exchange doesn't quite come around from this book.

A lot of the children were beginning to form into gangs. One gang leader tries to offer her a food for protection deal, and she declines it. Afterwards, she takes charge and turns her remaining neighbors into a militia. They arm themselves with remaining guns, Molotov cocktails, and various improvised weapons. They get their unprepared rears beaten up by the gang leader from before. Lisa again notices a piece of unclaimed property and moves everyone in. This is an old high school, and inside, Lisa's word becomes absolute law. She puts all the food inside, and fortifies the old school.

Now, the gang is not yet done with her. The gang attacks the school, Lisa gets shot, but is rescued by a friend. They then retake the school from the gang leader, who has learned that conquest does not employ mastery at leadership. Lisa ascends to power again, and everyone cheers. The book ends here.

Despite the Objectivist themes around the book, the writer fails to convey them in a practical, or even logical, manner. Lisa seems too smart for someone her age, and also too politically savvy. Much like Ayn Rand's hyper-idealized, Mary-Sue like characters, Lisa seems like a rather unconvincing ten-year old. Furthermore, instead of restoring a free exchange of goods and services, the whole post-apocalyptic situation is more vultures fighting over the juiciest bits of civilization's carcass.

Furthermore, Lisa uses the food to gain the support of her militia, and would withhold it if they do not act. She turned down that gang's food for protection deal so that she could play dictator herself. Now, there's an economic system that's all about controlling food and military might in an uneven exchange of both. It's something everyone but Luddites would hate: feudalism. Lisa essentially positions herself as a dictator, backed up by resources of food (found by luck rather than her own skill) and her militia. At least she, unlike most other post-apocalyptic characters, wants to restore civilization. But this one noble bit is outweighed by the rest of the novel.

Economics aside, there's another point that never gets clarified. Does the virus kill the kids once they reach age twelve? If not, humanity's going extinct real soon, since the only survivors are unable to even reach puberty. And even then, no one's around to give them “the Talk” but their peers. If they do make it to teenage years, things are about to get rather explicit for a children's book. Another problem is the death of all specialists. All the doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, technicians, and even garbage collectors who maintained existing infrastructure (such as electricity and running water) and modern civilization are all dead. Even assuming they re-learn a lot of science, they'd have to rebuild industries and social structures from the ground up again. Nothing like a pandemic and prepubescent angst to utterly ruin your chances of rebuilding civilization.

Despite the Objectivist themes of the book, it comes across as a poor copy of Ayn Rand (which is saying something). It's Ayn Rand meets “Lord of the Flies” in the suburbs of Chicago. Despite trying to paint Lisa as an innovative leader, she comes across as just another prepubescent warlord. If anything, the theme of this book is, “Kill your parents, take their stuff, and re-institute feudalism!” Oh, how amusing attempts to brainwash children are! They're already purely amoral (some of you prefer the term 'innocent') and interested in their own drives more than any other's rights. Having a book about free will, capitalism, and freedom from coercion in a post apocalyptic setting targeted at children is like fighting for peace, or fornicating for virginity. I'm Doktor Bizarro, and your worst tomes are my favorite tortures.