New world is out of order

Aussie writer casts a satirical eye on corporate society

By Paul Duchene

The Portland Tribune, Feb 25, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Everybody wants to rule the world, and Max Barry can prove it.

Last fall, Barry invented a free Internet game called www.NationStates.net Ñ think SimCity with countries Ñ to promote his new satire “Jennifer Government.”

“I e-mailed 20 friends, and I thought maybe 1,000 people would be playing by the time the book came out Jan. 21,” says the Australian novelist, speaking by phone from Los Angeles while on the book tour.

Barry vastly underestimated the game’s appeal. More than 140,000 people are playing the game worldwide, according to the Web site, and the players are inventing new nations with such unlikely names as the People’s Republic of Goobertronica, the Free Republic of Hair, the Holy Empire of Evil Garden Gnomica and the Free Republic of Rudies.

They’ve chosen slogans, flags and national beasts and run their countries in styles ranging from inoffensive centrist democracies to bloodstained dictatorships and corporate bordellos.

That last category is particularly intriguing to former Hewlett-Packard employee Barry, because corporate greed is the driving force behind the book “Jennifer Government.” Barry poses daily online questions to game contestants, and their responses trigger changes in their countries that show up the next day. Every decision has unforeseen pitfalls.

“The idea of both the game and the book is to explore the humor in everybody’s wacky political ideas,” Barry says. “Both came out of the idea that a free market paradise where the government had little power and there were no taxes would be a great place to live. It struck me as hilarious, and there was the foundation of the book. It may not be the world we live in, but you can see it from here.”

Barry’s book Ñ which has been compared to Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22” Ñ took 18 months to write and six months to edit, which included radical cuts and the loss of several characters.

“It got much slimmer and stayed true to the four or five key people in it,” he says with satisfaction.

There’s a 100-word disclaimer on the flyleaf emphasizing that it’s a work of fiction, even though the corporations he names are real.

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