I never expected to see a serious dystopian novel from Lawrence Watt-Evans. I knew he had a dark streak, as demonstrated in his extremely troubling Brown Magician series, but he's best known for intelligent, light fantasy not for works of political vision — at least not until he teamed up with Carl Parlagreco to write The Spartacus File.

The Spartacus File is more than just a dystopian novel, it's a polemic very specifically aimed at negative trends in current American society. There's no question that the storytelling and characterization suffer because of this, but the result is a novel which has the minimalist feel of classic dystopian works like Slan, The Day After Tomorrow and The Brave Free Men, where the story to a large extent takes a second seat to the message.

The novel is sent in a near future where the United States has evolved into a single-party corporate dominated state with a strong police aparatus where people are at the mercy of their employers, under the thumb of politcial oligarchs and at the mercy of covert police units which can make dissenters and troublemakers disappear. The Constitution is still theoretically in force, but after a major economic crisis it's been suspended and superseded by the needs of the all-powerful state.

Casper Beech is a cog in this machine-like society, overworked and undervalued and totally cowed and submissive — essentially a slave to the system. Then he's called into his boss's office and told that they're upgrading the software he uses, and to keep him up to speed he's going to be sent for neural programming to learn the new software instantly. Like a good sheep he takes the treatment, something goes wrong, and he's imprinted with a much more complex skill set accidentally downloaded from a covert government project.

What follows is a fast-paced, bare-bones narrative of Casper's efforts to stay alive while the government tries to eliminate him, and his coming to terms with the programming he was given — the 'Spartacus File' of the title — and acting on its compulsion to attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. Or as he interprets the purpose of the program, to return the nation to its Constitutional roots.