Review YOUTHOPIA USA is an antic novel by the great lexicographer Sol Steinmetz...Its dialogue is replete with "Slanglish"...Offbeat and fun. -- William Safire, The New York Times Magazine, December 17, 2000 Product Description Youthopia USA tells the story of a future government run by juveniles. The anti-hero of the novel is a Juvenocrat, Booper Simms, who finds himself at odds with the ruthless demands of his job and in the end becomes a criminal and fugitive. This is an antic, intriguing, funny, and deftly written novel in the futuristic vein of Huxley, Orwell, and Burgess. Sol Steinmetz is a noted American lexicographer. He lives in New York and this is his first work of fiction. From the Publisher Steinmetz's is a clear, strong voice and his novel is interesting and entertaining at the same time, pulling the reader into a fantastic world that is both comic and horrifying. YOUTHOPIA USA is reminiscent of the futuristic novels of Huxley, Waugh, Orwell, and Burgess. Overall, a great book. From the Author I was inspired to write this novel after reading that America is obsessed with its youth, who are at present 70 million strong. The growing influence and political power of the teens and twenty-somethings is being widely discussed in the media, since no one knows where it will lead as the generation gap widens. My novel envisions the takeover of America in this century by juveniles bent on reinventing the USA in their own image at the expense of the old --defined as anyone over 40. About the Author Sol Steinmetz is a noted American lexicographer. He lives in New York. This is his first work of fiction. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. You won't find this in the story books, old or new. There's no trail of it anywhere. Like it never went down. But I know it went down because I glimmed it myself. Yet, like the whole country, I looked the other way and let the thing slide out of mind. Millions of bods blown away. Wiped out. Transited. And I'm not yakking about the whacked-out 20th century. That's gone ahell. This story's about the mod 2030s, only twenty-five years ago. You laugh: but how could that fly? The people would've raised a stink and brought down the Dockists! N.O., it wasn't so. Mr. & Mrs. America loved the White Shirts and the clean streets and no sickos or oldies in sight. And that, bro, is the godawful fact. Sure, that was a long time ago. A quarter of a century's blown over since it went down. We thought it was a dynamo time, the birth of a fantasmo age, the building of a young, span-newey world. And I, Booper Simms, was a stargazing, daydreaming booger of twenty living in Fed City, Deecee, USA, when it went down. There was an election agoing and the scene in the country was charged with fireworks. The most pop new pol party was the Futurist Party, the party of the young, the fair, and the fit. The juves wore white uniforms which clung to their firm young bods in a way that made the fibers of my being tingle with a mungo buzz. I longed to belong with them. My old man bitched. He and Mother were museum pieces living in the ice age. "I don't care for their values," the o.m. sounded off when I made a pitch for joining the Futurists. "They are elitist, antidemocratic, superficial, and atheistic." "You're trashing them without knowing squat about their pitch," I shot back. That's the way we juves yakked in those days. "Don't give me that, boy. I know their platform. It's youth, youth, youth, health, health, health." "And what's so friggin bad about that?" "Everything. What about the old and the feeble?" "They're washed up. They don't count nomore." "Someday you'll be old, son. What then?" "Nothing. I'll get out of the way and let the kids take over." "That's what you say now. Wait till you get there." I glimmed that we were crossing wires. We'd never sync up. The gap between us was a thousand miles wide. He belonged to a gen that'd lost touc