by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Like the ’80s TV series Max Headroom, set “20 minutes in the future,” Maggie MacDonald’s debut novel presents a paranoid, technology- dominated reality (and rebellion) that, she says, may lie right around the corner. In some ways, the world has already caught up to Kill the Robot.

“The recent revelation in the New York Times about the NSA spying on people without a warrant—that’s just a hint of what’s possible, especially when there’s not enough protest against it and people don’t mobilize,” says the author, a mover and shaker in arts and politics. MacDonald ran as an NDP candidate in her hometown of Cornwall, Ontario, in 1999 (at the age of 20) and continues to work for NDP and various NGO campaigns. Now based in Toronto, she’s also an award-winning playwright, a visual artist (her illustrations dot Kill the Robot) and a musician—she’s both the frontwoman for the politicized dance-punk band Republic of Safety and a member of the internationally acclaimed Hidden Cameras.

Like MacDonald in her teenage years, the novel’s heroine, Moore White, immerses herself in the punk/zine subculture, though White’s experience is substantially more sinister. She lives under the rule (and surveillance) of a totalitarian regime and multinational tech corporation, where her anarchist associates are disappearing and isolation and illness abound. Within its cyber sci-fi framework, Kill the Robot also presents an alternate history, wherein John Hinckley succeeds in assassinating Ronald Reagan in 1981 and George Bush I takes the throne eight years early, thus accelerating the Western world’s downward spiral.

“There’s not even a need for the September 11th attack for the government to justify blatant surveillance the way it does now,” says the author. “We have it pretty bad in terms of government spying and the Americanization of our country, but it could be worse.”

How about Earth devastated by pollution and overrun with rodents? With co-director Stephanie Markowitz and songwriter Bob Wiseman, MacDonald recently wrapped a sold-out, six-show Toronto run of her musical, The Rat King (soon to be a graphic novel), a truly dystopian tale set roughly a century in the future.

“As a writer, I feel that presenting dystopias is like pulling an alarm, saying these possible futures can be prevented,” says MacDonald. “If we assume that there’s hope, that there’s a way to make things better, when we struggle towards that, we’re gambling, but it’s a win-win situation. Either you’ve taken that time to act and it helped and there’s a better time to look forward to, or, if there’s not a better time to look forward to, at least you tried, and that’s a great thing. That, in itself, produces hope.”

From someone concerned with the protection of our environment, our civil liberties, our (Canadian) sovereignty and arts funding (her current book tour was made possible by Canada Council), here are some words for our new Prime Minister, were he to read the Mirror:

“With our country being so big and all the cities being so far apart, it’s so difficult to make a living as an artist. For us to create a culture and communicate with each other, we really need some help. Government grants are very important to the arts.”

Reading with fellow McGilligan Books authors Debra Anderson, Klyde Broox and Zoe Whittall at Casa Del Popolo
on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 5 p.m., free