Review: Choose Your Own Adventure in American Futures

What if you could choose your own adventure for the future of the United States? That's the premise of American Futures, written by Tom Jenney, an Arizona native of libertarian bent who spent years as a fixture on the state's think tank and lobbying scene.

Within the book's conceptual framework, aliens are among us and can control our minds, to the degree they can force majorities to agree with and act on any given ideology. As a sort of social science–fiction experiment, the reader can impose any of 14 different political philosophies onto the nation. The book then becomes a series of choose-your-own-ideology adventures narrating how things would likely turn out in each timeline.

The book is massive—three volumes in its printed doorstop edition. But it's an easy read, since Jenney uses hyperlinking in the navigable (and far cheaper) Kindle edition to let readers take short trips into the future through multiple scenarios for each ideology. Some scenarios evolve naturally, while others test systems' responses to war, natural disaster, and even the Rapture.

Jenney's libertarian leanings and his background in economics and politics come through, to the degree that certain points—such as warnings about high debt and inflation—inevitably start to seem repetitive. The main characters vary from story to story, and Jenney manages to make most of them sympathetic no matter their ideology, though that dedication necessarily frays for some very unsavorily authoritarian options.

It's a quirky book, but it's oddly addictive. While not a traditional policy tome, it's a serious attempt to consider the impact of the choices we make in the voting booth.