BOOK REVIEW: ‘Thought Criminal’ by Dr. Michael Rectenwald

Dr. Rectenwald was a Trotskyite Marxist just a few short years ago. His previous works, Springtime for Snowflakes, Google Archipelago and Beyond Woke (all from New English Review Press) explain the new “woke left” from the inside out. Just as no one could explain the communist movement of the twentieth century like ex-communists (see The God Who Failed, Witness, etc.), Professor Rectenwald has spent the last several years explaining the new woke, corporate left with precision and insight.

Now, he returns with a novel, which, though set in an undefined future, explains out current dilemma perfectly. Hailed as “the 1984 of the Covid era,” Thought Criminal ingeniously describes where we are and where we are going in an entertaining, roller-coaster ride of a novel.

Summary:

A distinguished Professor of AI-neuroscience and Theory of Mind, Cayce Varin has dissident thoughts. He differs from acceptable opinion on matters of grave importance to respectable Human Biologicals and the Federation of Pandemos, the global state. Upon confessing his divergent theories to a Graduate Student Assistant, his life is never the same. He is labeled a Thought Deviationist, among other damning designations. He is arrested by a Robot Police Agent and soon released but remains a covert Thought Deviationist living under the constant fear of future arrest, the treachery of friends, and the loss of his identity.

For Varin and a small cadre of Thought Deviationists, the ultimate threat is posed by Collective Mind—the vast centralized database and processing complex with apparent knowledge of everything, possibly even one’s innermost thoughts. Varin and fellow Thought Deviationists believe that the Federation deliberately propagates a virus to keep Human Biologicals connected to Collective Mind. Submission to the virus spells the obliteration of the self. Resistance to the virus, made possible by taking the addictive drug Eraserall, means living as a fugitive from the law and being forever hunted by Robot Police Agents to be taken in for “treatment.”

Finally, it appears that the only solution is to infiltrate Essential Data, Collective Mind’s main data and processing center. The risks are great, and the gambit may be impossible. But Varin’s future, the future of Thought Deviationists, and the future of the individual itself, depend on the mission’s success.

Advance Praise:

Kenneth R. Timmerman, NY Times best-selling author of The Election Heist and other books:

Michael Rectenwald has written a thought experiment for our time, the 1984 of the COVID era, where we can step back and view today’s America for what it is: a society infected not by a virus but by collective hysteria. Thought Criminal explores the meaning of individualism in an increasingly collectivist society, where our thoughts are not our thoughts but those infused in us by the media and the Collective Mind, and the very notion of free will becomes a distant memory. This is fiction that makes us think and makes us dream.

Janice Fiamengo, retired Professor of English, University of Ottawa:

Both an allegory for our present collectivist times and a vision of the future, Thought Criminal draws you in irresistibly from the first pages, immersing you in a thrilling and disturbing adventure.

ABOUT DR. MICHAEL RECTENWALD

Michael Rectenwald is a recently retired Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University, where he taught cultural and social history as well as academic writing since 2008. He is the author of ten books, including Beyond Woke (New English Review Press, 2020), Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (New English Review Press, 2019), Springtime for Snowflakes: ‘Social Justice’ and Its Postmodern Parentage (New English Review Press, 2018), Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Academic Writing, Real World Topics (Broadview Press, 2015), and Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age (De Gruyter, 2015). Rectenwald is a prominent spokesperson for academic freedom and free speech and an expert on the history and character of the ‘social justice’ movement. He has published articles and essays on these topics in several periodicals and news outlets and has appeared regularly on national television networks, as well as on numerous podcasts and radio shows.

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