No Kidding is Brooks's first science fiction novel. Set in Washington, D.C.

sometime in the twenty-first century, the book describes an America ravaged by the effect of rampant alcoholism and a rapidly declining birth rate. Both catastrophes were triggered, evidently, by some previously undiscovered, long term effect of exposure to cathode ray tubes of the sort used in televisions and computers. With the collapse of the electronics industry and sixty-nine percent of adult Americans suffering from some degree of alcoholism, the only growth business in the United States involves various forms of treatment for the disease. Millions of adult Americans, made wards of their nonalcoholic, teen-aged children, have been committed to Soberlife reeducation facilities. Most public education is centered on the AO (alcoholic offspring) Curriculum. Also damaged by this radical reorganization of American society have been the traditional churches, which stand almost empty, although the Steemers, a...