Then Richard meets Josie, a peculiar whore engaged in serious crimes: She owns books, tends live plants and keeps an illegal computer in her apartment. Soon the two are entangled in a bizarre intellectual and sexual love affair. It is a relationship with no future; even if Richard could dissolve his relationship with his chosen mate, Diana, Josie cannot cross the social boundaries between their separate worlds. The daughter of a famously martyred political dissident, she hates the City State and all it stands for ... especially its conditioning regimes. Without conditioning, there is no opportunity for her to move out of the slums, into Richard's prosperous and more antiseptic neighborhood.

Seeking an escape—any escape—from mounting psychological distress, Richard lashes out in an unexpected direction, confronting his wife's abusive supervisor out of a misguided desire to make up for his adultery. Diana responds by signing them both up for a drug-laced regimen of intensive emotional reprogramming that leaves Richard more confused—and more dangerous—than before. He is primed for an explosion ... and when the City State demolishes the last of its slums, forcibly relocating Josie in the process, it inadvertently provides the spark.

Forbidden love in a stifling future

Bruce Boston's The Guardener's Tale plays out in a chilling near-future Earth where drug therapy and brainwashing have been aggressively applied to humanity's social problems in an attempt to eliminate all but the most benign traces of individuality from the population. Even mild aberrations—cheating at gambling, for example—can cause the government and its Guardeners to reprogram a citizen's mind. The City State lurks as a gleaming, quiet and utterly smothering presence on every page of this novel. As with the best of SF settings, it is as much a character in this book as any of the people trapped within its quiet, tidy neighborhoods.

Sadly, Boston tells his story in the distanced, pompous tones of a police report, keeping the reader at arm's length throughout what should be an increasingly unsettling tour of Richard Thorne's life. His disintegration into the violent slum denizen, "Rick," is described in detail but never quite reaches the level of vicarious experience.

Meanwhile, Diana and Josie both receive superficial and unsympathetic treatment, leaving them unable to make up this deficit. With no likable central characters who can brighten up, however briefly, this well-constructed but uniformly gray world, and with an overly convenient plot twist serving as the launch point for the book's conclusion, The Guardener's Tale comes closest in its tone to a nonfiction account of a less-than-fascinating crime—it has occasional moments of interest, to be sure, but it lacks any satisfying dramatic unity.