Since I do a bit of traveling, I have the time to listen to a lot of books. I am not working my way through the 100 best books ever written, or following any plan at all for that matter. Just what pops up on the library shelf and looks like I might like it.
feed- M.T. Anderson, David Aaron Baker (Narrator)-sounded like a kind of cool sci-fi novel, which I am pretty much a fan of. So I slide the first CD in hoping to have an interesting couple of hours. Somewhere it says satire in relation to this bit of rubbish, which means that it is trash not to be taken seriously, it’s just for fun, Unit! In this book, everyone has cancer and is dying, there is no life on Earth anymore, everyone’s brain is hooked up to a supercomputer whose sole job is to sell useless items to the dying, and humans can no longer reproduce-hey, are we having fun yet?
If this book had been written, say forty-five years ago, and by say, a genius like Anthony Burgess , it would have been called A Clockwork Orange. Except that there was some biting social commentary in A Clockwork Orange, and it was a pretty nasty bit of business. The Feed is like A Clockwork Orange for sixth graders. Our heroes, such as they are, are young people of never specified ages who use a lot of profanity and booze to while away the empty hours of their pointless lives. Like most soft sci-fi you are not really encouraged to do much thinking while you read. The earth is dying and everyone is covered with lesions, and yet there are people living throughout the solar system. Not only living on other planets, but traveling back and forth with ease.
The McGuffin, as Hitchcock liked to call the gimmicks in his films, is that everyone who is ‘rich’ on Earth has an implanted micro-chip that makes them connected to the Feed at all times. The Feed is like being online all the time, or walking around talking on your cell phone, as most people in this brave new world tend to interact with the Feed more often than the real people around them. But it is not as sophisticated as say, The Matrix, where the real world is replaced by the cyber world. Here you are constantly hooked up and bombarded with cyberads and requests to chat, but still have to drag around your dying body.
In time the lesions become cool, and people even buy fake ones. The obvious relation to our world being the recent, as in the last ten to twenty years, obsessions with tattoos and body art of one sort or another, even though most of it does very little to make a person more attractive, just different. The idea here being, I suppose, what will it take to shock parents that already look like circus freaks themselves? Open wounds and self induced seizures seem to be the ticket. Everyone hooked up to the feed is a bit of an idiot as well. Having all the knowledge of the world in the Feed, they never bother learning anything themselves.
If you dropped this book into a word processor and removed all the profanity and the words dude, meg and unit, the book would vanish in a poof of good taste. It is a pointless story that is so far behind the times that I wonder how it ever made it to press. I know everything has been done before, but when it has been done so much better before, why put up with this trash?
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