Recent Reads

Feed, by M.T. Anderson. This book has been marketed as a YA book, but in fact it's one of the best pieces of science fiction, adult or otherwise, that I've read in the last year.

The protagonist, a teenager in a media-saturated near future, has been implanted with a constantly-connected wireless internet connection, the "feed" of the title. The stream-of-consciousness first person narration puts the reader inside his mind, complete with constant interruptions from targeted advertisements and other come-ons. The result is an effective depiction of one speculative near-future in which I hope I never have to live.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that most science fiction deals with two classic questions: "What if...?" and "If this goes on...?" Feed deals with both. The "feed" upon which the story depends is not, literally, available today, so on one level the story portrays the possible consequences of a speculative technological development. On a metaphorical level, though, the of constant and pervasive electronic connectivity that permeates our society approximates the ubiquitous "feed" and its instant, though shallow and biased, responsiveness to queries and "customer profiles".

A first-person narrative can't help but be sympathetic to its narrator, but the protagonist of Feed is anything but a hero. At times while reading the novel, I wanted to kick his self-indulgent butt (possibly because, in some ways, I recognized his failings as ones that I have at times displayed). Even though the author supplies plenty of clues to explain his choices, he's still an exasperating moral failure. The ending is ambiguous. I don't think it constitutes a spoiler to say that at the end of the novel, it's questionable whether he has truly "learned a valuable lesson about love."