Truth is stranger than fiction. The premise of “Big Air,” author Stuart Greenbaum’s newest venture into futuristic fiction, is becoming strangely realistic. Before potential readers have an opportunity to laugh or be dismayed by the prospect of breathing fresh air from personal cannisters — the real thing is available at Wal-Mart and other accommodating establishments. The story’s dystopian scenario — of people blithely accepting another previously unfathomable, yet now convenient, workaround to our short-sighted abuse of natural resources — parallels our casual consumption of fresh water from plastic bottles.
Boost Oxygen offers “95 percent pure supplemental oxygen for all-natural respiratory support” in convenient, portable, personal cannisters. How lucky are we? To know that a manufacturer is looking out for our best interests as we, according to “Big Air,” gradually but surely deplete our planet’s supply of breathable air.
Boost is shilled in TV commercials by no less than “Shark Tank” co-star Kevin O’Leary, who invested $1 million in the product after a presentation on a 2019 episode of the show. O’Leary says Boost is one of his favorite investments and claims he uses the product “daily for respiratory support during travel, exercise, meetings, and more.”
“Big Air,” the feature story in Greenbaum’s compendium of short fictions — arithmetically titled Big Air & Eight Smaller Fictions — offers a decidedly less encouraging vision of humankind’s reliance on manufactured fresh air to compensate for our callous disregard for life-sustaining oxygen … by talking too much. It is fiction, after all, but apparently now figuratively more than literarily.
To further grasp and gasp over the future of Big Air, the prophetic book is available for purchase through Humble Sky publishing.
I sold most of my oil stocks and bought big air in a big way 15 years ago. Driving past the feed lots in the Central Valley you had to know we would get here.
Yep, I-5 offers a distinct fresh-air reality check.