Vancouver writer George Case’s first novel isn’t really a novel at all but a brief speculative history which, from the cultural utopia of the year 2500, looks back over time to the hysterical info-blather of 1997. Silence Descends participates in the literary tradition that includes Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but is closest in intent to William Morris’s News From Nowhere in that both books end up providing an improbable but snuggly model of socialist perfection.

The narrative begins in the year 2004, when the Russian city of Volgograd is suddenly annihilated in a nuclear explosion brought about by political terrorists. Despite the fact that more people learn of the disaster faster than ever on the Net and from other super-fast electronic news sources, the massive human loss is met with indifference. This event is the first in a series of global conflicts that Case’s history attributes to the demoralizing effects of info technology. Directly or indirectly, the end of the Information Age is caused by nuclear war, renewed volcanic activity, earthquakes, and the melting of the polar icecaps. But Silence Descends is only partly about the end of the world, for these bleak developments lead to a global revolution that gives rise to the Community of Soul, a time of equality, peace, and anti-materialist thought.

Like many other writers grappling with the issue of information technologies today, Case comes up with funky new terms to describe our present condition, some of them cleverly coined (“cyberopolis” for a geographic area densely connected by data exchanges, “hackerlords” for those who monopolize information for their own profit). There are also hopeful ideas about the future that all readers will find encouraging: literary art returns to prominence and all the “book is dead” Internet droolers are not only proven wrong, but (virtually) expunged from the planet.

In the end, the novel’s central conceit is too limited and the polemic too slight of scope to advance Silence Descends as an important example of either the utopian or anti-utopian genres. However, the work exhibits a young marriage of intelligence and imagination that may well yield more fully realized speculations down the road.