This excellent novel is one of the few by Ira Levin that was never made into a movie. (Not quite anyway; see below.) It was called to my attention from one of my favorite sources of book recommendations: the Libertarian Futurist Society, which gave This Perfect Day a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. By the time I finished reading it, I found that there are some very interesting libertarian connections with artistic influences and intellectual debts.
The world of this novel is a future Earth dystopia of conformity and perfect equality which is run by a master computer called “Uni” (short for “Uni-Comp”), and everyone is strictly required to take a monthly dose of “treatment” (meds) to deaden their desires and individuality. Thus medicated, people dread being “different”, a sense of that being sin. The idea of “choosing” seems odd and heretical to them. The very idea of choosing a job instead of Uni assigning it to you, of “deciding” and “picking” anything – these are all “manifestations of selfishness” and are outlawed in this future world. The only historical knowledge people have is vaguely that of the “pre-Uni chaos”, and they never really study it.
Part Two is “Coming Alive.” Our protagonist falls in with some non-conformists, proto-individualists who are able to reduce their treatment dosages without getting caught, and they tell him about what these new experiences are like. They introduce him to new concepts, such as “consent”, which they explain means “your body is yours, not Uni’s”, and he doesn’t have to take the treatments.
The reduced treatments wake him up for the first time in his life. He and his new friends start furtively going through old pre-Uni books in museums and find that these ancients indeed had some bad experiences but also happy ones: e.g., going wherever they chose, “earning” things, “owning” things, and always choosing; the ancients were more alive.
By reading to this point in my review, you might see a parallel between this 1970 novel and a certain 2002 movie. The Introduction to my Kindle edition of This Perfect Day is by Jonathan Trigell, and he mentions the close similarity between this novel and Kurt Wimmer’s film, Equilibrium (2002), one of my favorite movies which I had earlier reviewed here. This film had originally been recommended to me on a neo-Objectivist-libertarian e-list over ten years ago.
This novel also reminds one of Ayn Rand’s 1938 novella, Anthem, e.g., a person cannot choose his or her profession but is rather assigned it. And there is an even more interesting Rand connection.
Jeff Riggenbach writes (in Mises Daily, 3 December 2010) that Levin had read Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and that he studied a bit at Objectivism’s original educational enterprise, the Nathaniel Branden Institute, in the late 50s and early 60s, and – quoting Barbara Branden (1986) – Levin “began to enter the circle of Ayn’s friends.” Riggenbach’s review of the novel is very good (but he does give away a few spoilers), and he points out that the book’s primary weakness is in economics. Still, he calls This Perfect Day “one of the top half-dozen libertarian novels ever published in our language.” Coming from Jeff, that is high praise.
-Zenwind.
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