Living on the Edge–an interview with Alex London

A couple weeks ago, I went on a scary, spectacular ride. The ride was a book, Proxy by Alex London.

Imagine a world where life is so expensive for most people that they must go into enormous debt just to survive. They are known as proxies. Their debt is held by wealthy patrons. Patrons can live life however they want because they never experience the consequences for their actions—their proxies do, receiving the punishment for whatever misdeed their patron committed.

Syd is a proxy. His patron, Knox, likes to play pranks. And Syd, of course, takes the punishment. But one of Knox’s pranks goes too far and a girl is killed. Syd, who has worked hard and is two short years away from being debt free, receives a death sentence for Knox’s crime.

Syd decides to fight back. And that’s when he learns that he’s no ordinary proxy and he might just hold the key to destroying the entire system.

J.L. POWERS: What was the spark for this story, a story about debt, and class structures, and the difference between the haves and have-nots?

ALEX LONDON: When I began the project, I knew I wanted to write a kind of cyberpunk version of the Whipping Boy concept, where the poor take the punishment for the rich. I didn’t, however, know how the world should function that way. Why wouldn’t the poor just rise up in revolution? Then I got a student loan bill in the mail and realized the answer came to my house every month: debt. The people turned themselves into profits for the corporations, just as we do today every time we borrow and repay at usurious rates. We financialized ourselves. Proxy is just an imagined extreme of that, where everyone and everything is for sale. It is the extreme ideology of the absolute free market run wild. There is no government, there is only the market and you get only as much citizenship, only as many laws, and only as much freedom as you can pay for. Sadly, it is too often true not just in my imagined future world, but in our time as well for many many people.

POWERS: And a follow up question to that, did your research on children in war zones (from your book One Day the Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War, written under another of your pseudonyms, Charles London) factor in to the writing of this book?

LONDON: Yes, very much so. I was able to imagine the world in which Syd and the other Proxies live in with such clarity because it is not so different from the world in which many young people today live, a world where kindness and generosity exist right alongside unimaginable brutality, where the struggled for resources pits the powerless against the powerless to the benefit of the powerful. Syd’s neighborhood in Proxy is imaginary, but it is not so far off from Kibera in Kenya or the slums of Mumbai, or even, in some ways, certain neighborhoods of Chicago. I was considering, in much of this story, the statement by juvenile justice advocate Bryan Stevenson: “The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In much of the world, the opposite of poverty is justice.”

POWERS: NPR recently included Proxy in a discussion of y.a. books that deal with economic insecurity. How do you think these dystopic books, including yours, respond to the economic problems that have dominated news in recent years? Proxy emerged directly from our recent economic instability and inequality.

LONDON: It was not meant as a political statement. It was just that I draw inspiration from the world around me, and economic foment is in the air. I’m less interested in the politics of this, in fact. Politics come and go. I am interested in the human element. What does the conflation of the economy and morality do to our social fabric? What does it do to us as individuals? These are the questions I hope young people reading Proxy will find worth considering. Of course, it is entirely up to readers to bring their own experiences to the story and take from it what they will. 

POWERS: Dystopic books tend to present a world where a collapse has already happened…and now things are getting worse for the protagonist. In what way can these books address teens’ fears and disillusionment about the world they’re inheriting? Where is the hope (or even, do we need hope in these books)?

LONDON: I think dystopian stories (and I do hate that label, actually…a dystopia is, after all, a utopia for someone…just depends what side you’re on) succeed in connecting to teens  not because they address some kind of fear of the future or message of change, but because they validate the teenage experience (and hopefully provide a fun, imaginative yarn in the process). When you’re a teen, everything feels very big, very immediate and important. Every feeling and choice can, in the moment, feel like life or death. Dystopian fiction makes those feelings a reality. Every decision is life or death. Everything the teen does does have epic consequences. Also, these brutal worlds we writers imagine do reflect a modern teen’s life–the power structures, arbitrary seeming rules, lack of control over your own fate, complex and fraught social relations–that’s just high school. Also, in fitting with the concept of Proxy, being a teen often does feel like being punished for someone else’s crime. So, I don’t think they need to have ‘hope’ as a message. They need to have honesty. Teens, though they rarely admit it, are optimists. They are all about the future. They supply the hope. I just supply the story.

POWERS: Proxy also portrays class structure in a fascinating way. I found it interesting that there appears to be no middle class in the book. There are the haves–and they have everything–and the have nots, who have nothing (unless they are willing to go into debt for it). Was this a deliberate choice, to excise the middle class? Can your book work as a socialist critique of extreme capitalism–or would you not wish to go that far? Why or why not?

LONDON: There is no middle class in Proxy. That’s true. I see technology and the unregulated financialization of everything (turning everything and everyone into a financial product, a set of numbers, defining all relationships as transactional) as hollowing out the middle class. Wealth flows to the wealthy, but those without elite access to financial markets just get poorer. With advances in robotics and computing, an entire class of workers is being made redundant. I can imagine a point when the middle class is only valuable as consumers, not as creators or contributors to society…and that can’t last long. I wouldn’t, however, call my book a socialist critique of capitalism–although it can be read that way, sure, and I am certainly left-leaning in my politics. BUT, I am skeptical of all ideologies that place themselves ahead of individuals. So in Proxy, it is the unfettered free market unchecked by mercy that destroys people, but there is a sequel and well…let’s just say some beloved ideas of socialism come in for a pretty aggressive critique as well. Extremes are the problem. The world of Proxy is a cruel laissez faire nigthmare, but the left gave us Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge…no system has a monopoly on brutality.  I believe our hope as a civilization lies not in ideology, but in each other, as fully valued individuals. In this world I’ve created for Proxy, the consequences for our failings to recognize the humanity in each other are dire. I suppose, that goes for this world we live in too. Speculative fiction is make-believe, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also true.