Feed by M.T. Anderson (2002)
236 pages
Summary: For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon – a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a not-so-brave new world — and a smart, savage satire that has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now.
I’d been looking forward to this book for ages and wanted to like it so much but it was so much worse than I was expecting. But maybe that’s the problem, I was expecting something different…I don’t know.
The summary indicates the book tells of a future world that is scary in its similarity to what’s happening right now. I didn’t get that at all. Yes, everyone has a feed but that seemed like it wasn’t even the most important part of the story. The plot was so focused on the characters that I feel it hardly commented on what was happening around them.
Basically Titus meets Violet and, because she’s homeschooled by her brainy father and didn’t get a feed until she was 7, she questions things in the world. I was led to believe that Titus would start questioning things because of the few days he spent in the hospital without the feed. And, yes, at a party he does mention that everyone is pretending like nothing happened. But when Violet brings up some tough issues, he doesn’t seem that interested and doesn’t want to take action.
Plus, the issues are only brought up from time to time and aren’t built upon or really fleshed out. There were some snippets from the feed about world news but that was all. So I don’t think the author succeeded in cementing the world in the reader’s mind.
A few other things that bothered me about this book:
- The slang language the characters use: It was really distracting and didn’t make sense. It really affected the flow of the book for me and I felt like I was stumbling over words as I read. Even the adults use “like” a lot and it got annoying.
- If the world is so advanced that teens spend spring break on the moon, why doesn’t anyone realize that the feed can kill you?
- Superfluous science fiction reminders: It seemed like the author threw in things that didn’t add anything to the story and weren’t even explained. The seemed to serve only as a constant reminder that the book was set in the future. For example: people go to “choking parties;” there was a “treadmill that lit things up;” a woman “wearing sandals and a proton lid.” I was constantly going, “huh?” as I read and none of it made sense or was explained. I think the author was trying to create the feel of a futuristic world but it was just confusing.
- Titus and Violet meet on the moon and then begin dating. She just happens to live 200 miles from him?
- Again, if technology was so advanced, when he bought things on the feed, why did he still have to enter his address multiple times? And, when they decided to go to a restaurant, they got there and found out it’d been closed for a year. Why didn’t the feed tell them that?
- If this is supposed to be a cautionary tale, it didn’t come across like that. No one was forcing people to get the feed and the seemed to enjoy having it. Can you really blame companies if people choose to buy their products?
So a few things just didn’t make sense and pulled me out of the story. Plus why did School and Clouds have trademarks? And why did people use disposable tables? What was causing the lesions people kept getting? So what were some positives of this book?
- It was an interesting and unique idea.
- It was easy and quick reading.
- There were some thought-provoking passages, like the one on page 174 when Violet describes her bucket list. She states, “Everything I think of when I think of really living, living to the full–all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms. See what I mean? My idea of life, it’s what happens when they’re rolling the credits. My god. What am I, without the feed? It’s all from the feed credits. My idea of real life.” Really gets you thinking about how much the media influences your life and your ideas about who you are or what you want to do and be.
It wasn’t all bad and I did finish the book, even read it in a single day. But I was expecting much more and I don’t think grouping this book in with the works of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is accurate at all.
Still, a lot of people enjoyed this book, so maybe I’m missing something. What did you think of it? Am I disappointing myself by setting my expectations too high?
My Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Book Nympho 