There are books that speculate, and there are books that reflect. The Emergency does both. It reads like a mirror angled just slightly away from our world, revealing not just the surface of society, but the contours beneath—the buried fractures, the fault lines we’d rather not acknowledge. In that way, it’s a novel that feels less like a narrative, and more like an echo chamber for our collective disquiet.

George Packer has long been a chronicler of politics and power, but in The Emergency, he abandons the comforts of journalism and embraces fiction’s messy, metaphorical terrain. The result is a work that resists clean interpretations. At its heart is a father and daughter, locked not just in familial tension, but in an ideological rift that feels eerily contemporary: he is anchored in the rituals of the old world; she leaps—sometimes blindly—toward a new one.

Their conflict is not simply generational. It is epistemological. What is truth? Who decides which traditions are worth preserving, and which ones are scaffolds for oppression? These questions play out not in grand manifestos but in small, human acts—rejections, silences, miscommunications. And that is where Packer’s strength lies. Even while building a world so clearly allegorical, he allows its people to stay stubbornly real.

Yes, there are dystopian tropes—the fraying of democratic order, the seductive call of populism, the young remaking myths into weapons—but Packer handles them with an almost anthropological restraint. The Yeoman aren’t caricatures. The City isn’t a monolith. No side owns virtue or vice, and that ambiguity is the novel’s greatest truth. In a polarized world, The Emergency suggests that clarity is a luxury; complexity is what we must live with.

The novel’s success lies not in predicting the future, but in capturing the present as it slips through our hands. It doesn’t offer comfort. It doesn’t choose sides. What it does—quietly, insistently—is ask whether we are still capable of listening to each other across the noise. And in that, The Emergency feels less like fiction, and more like a test.

4.5 stars

Let me say upfront that some of the best speculative fiction is often written by authors that we don't usually associate with science fiction. Packer proves my suspicion. He has the scholarly chops to offer us an intelligent political allegory. It's not clunky, nor are the characters mere mouthpieces but overall it felt like a philosophy of history set to story. Something, that I personally enjoy. It's prescient. Emergency is captivating in the sense of slowing down for a car wreck. This is my way of warning you that sometimes reading this novel felt a little too close to the mark. So let me ask, do you enjoy reading about people trying to live through Imperial Melancholy--that Ozymandias time of long autumnal shadows when an empire’s best days are well behind her? If so dear reader this is the novel for you.

Thank you to Net Galley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for letting me read this advance copy!

Reading any dystopia and being truly swept away in 2025 is difficult: current affairs have been too influential on our perception of reality. This novel feels dangerously of the moment, and therefore quickly dated, at the start: it seems clear that this world is an echo of current fears of fascism in America and the not yet vanished language of the pandemic. Throughout, there is an Orwellian distrust of group-think and a focus on how tradition, hierarchy, and individualism are necessary parts of a functional society.

The protagonist, a self-professed ‘humanist’ and firmly established member of the ‘elite’ or ‘bourgeoisie’ depending on your preferred period of social upheaval, is unwilling to accept the new social order that has taken over his society:

"'This is unprecedented,' he kept repeating, as if the insight might solve their problem."

His daughter, on the other end of the spectrum, embraces the new order with some naivety, but also desperation. It becomes clear as the novel progresses that she is actually extremely intelligent, but is being wilfully naive as she is searching for some form of meaning or hope that she can be part of to create a world that is better and more just than her father’s. She is searching for moral meaning in the future; he found his purpose in the past and is deeply hurt by her rejection of his identity. As a depiction of generational conflict, their relationship is believable and sweet — both have the power to hurt each other, and do, but are also trying to communicate across the divide.

The plot is very readable; Packer has not forgotten to entertain. The allegorical, storyteller’s tone is reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin — science fiction by the way of reality. At the start, it is so close to reality, it threatens to push the reader out of enjoying the imaginary world, although the plot swiftly picks up pace and draws us into the unique conflicts of this universe.

The conflicts in 'The Emergency' (generational divide, societal malaise, virtue signalling, refugees, class and immigration, xenophobia, the control of social media over the young, the cruelty of meritocracy, the danger of mob rule) are ripped from our headlines, and therefore it would be easy for us to draw parallels between our own beliefs and the events of the novel, casting moral judgements on the author’s choices.

However, this also feels like a fruitless exercise. As one example, the Yeoman, who repeatedly refer to themselves as ‘native’ and are legitimately a colonised people with an uneasy relationship with the ‘City’, are shown to be practical and stereotypically connected to nature. However, their young people also appear to be mini-fascists, or violent thugs, corrupting old myths to suit their own ends. This is not dissimilar to their peers in the city, who are also discovering violence, albeit in a different way. A colonialist reading would be easy — Packer refers to the old regime as an empire to make it even easier — but it is also more complex and human than that. It’s about lack of communication, and fear, and how divide is easily sown between people. Perhaps it is also about how the young can be both dangerous and innocent because of their naivety and desire to make a mark on the world.

Packer deftly weaves together different themes of upheaval and identity, but avoids taking a side. Ultimately, this novel is about what it means to be human in a time of generational change. Meaning, in ‘The Emergency’, is found through making connections and trying to communicate even if you don’t understand: this is what all the characters we are rooting for try to do in their own way, to make the world better.