Supercenter

RAISED IN A RETAIL SUPERCENTER and tasked with playing war games on the Siege Arena video console, corporate sponsored Buy-All associate G.E. Westinghouse may just be the most well-trained recruit to come out of the Buy-All Virtual Training Corps - but his methodological precision in battle is often criticized as cowardly, if not somewhat apathetic. He lives in a quiet, uppershelf compartment on Aisle 17 with his young sister Nestle, an aspiring painter beholden by her imaginative renderings of outer space. Here, order is maintained by instilling a sense of fear in the resident associates that their capitalistic livelihood depends on victory in a war waged against the ideology of “Schwagism” on the distant planet Pepsicon. Upon discovering a strange blueprint and suspecting there may be more to his universe than meets the eye, G.E. ventures to the abandoned aisles of the Supercenter, where a band of insurgents refuse employment and call themselves the United Associates Cooperative. Led by one of the Supercenter’s only adults, the UAC seeks to undermine the authority of Management and plans to sabotage the minds of Supercenter Associates. As the Supercenter begins to descend into chaos, G.E. suffers from terrifying dreams that compel him to find a way, any way, beyond the walls of Supercenter #1501

"Jason Rizos’ first novel, Supercenter, is a wildly imaginative work of science fiction with a strong allegorical dimension, like Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. Set in a sealed Supercenter, it portrays a world in itself, as enclosed as a space ship, where children are raised without knowing anything about the outside world. Their ultimate purpose is hidden from them, even as their education consists of violent video games. The reader reels at the strange familiarity of the place, and the mountain of lies it is built on. The writing is exceptionally vivid and compelling, as is the best science fiction, and full of surprises. No reader will ever enter a supercenter again without being haunted by this hallucinatory vision."