Amnesiascope

This story is about a alternative-Los Angeles surrounded by fire and twisted into a nearly unrecognizable landscape of violence, perversion, inanity, self-destruction and self-examination. It's a wild ride along with several characters whose jobs and lives seem magically normal in a world that is anything but.

Los Angeles is not what we would expect, but worse, it is somehow surrounded by constant, massive firestorms the define the limits of the city and the inhabitants world. Unfortunately, the author does not understand that such continuous, city-girdling fire so close to a population center would create a literallly unlivable, choking, lung-destroying smog, and not a colorful, distant and slightly annoying and inconvenient reminder of human folly. It's not even clear where the fuel for the fires comes, as the fires burn at all times, with no end or diminishment.

Since thsi is fhe framing element for the story, the story is thus already fatally compromised by the author's excitement by and ingornance of the impact of wild fires and nearby populations.

Along with this, the people in this dystopian LA seem to have jobs, seem to be connected to the rest of the country, but only in the most tenuous and putative ways, as though the fires are a prison and escape is barely, if at all possible. As such, the characters have descended into an extreme distortion of the human condition, wihcih is complletely normal for a work of dystopan fiction.

So there is a core of interest in this utterly impossible world of smoke and pollution, but in the end it is not worthy of the readers time.