West Lawn Park is a fervent, faithful friend of liberal democracy. John Feffer's Splinterlands is a chilling, inventive and realistic dissertation on why this faith is justified. To anoint this novel as my generation's 1984 is fair. I hope everyone I know, those who think like me and those who think differently than me read it. And then maybe we can have a healthy and productive discussion about what it means to live with seven billion other humans on one planet.