Golden State combines both the notion of an apocalypse and that of an alternate reality to investigate reality, fiction, and the social consequences and epistemological status of truth. Winters is the author of the “pre-apocalyptic” Last Policeman series as well as an alternate-reality vision of an America in which the Civil War never happened ( Underground Airlines). But this Golden State is no paradise of transparent communication and human connection it is a total surveillance state, a dystopia that relies on capturing each tiny truth of every minute of each day of its citizens' lives, in order to archive and, if necessary, verify the “Objectively So.” The bulk of the story is an intense exploration of the consequences of this social contract based on the total dependence on truth and the categorical rejection of lies. In Winters’s alternative California (which seems to be limited to suburban Los Angeles) in Golden State, truth is valued above all, which would seem to be a “golden state” indeed, in contrast to our current muddle.
Winters’s new novel, Golden State, seems to be a Swiftian, post-Trumpian satire, a portrait of a culture based on a total ban on untruth, suggesting that the novel is a response to the lies that have dominated American politics in the current administration.
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