Really good novel: Zed, by Joanna Kavenna

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  • March 13, 2020 at 11:00 am #112219
    Avatar photoBilly_T
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    https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611586/zed-by-joanna-kavenna/

    This one is right up the leftist alley.

    A Sci-Fi, dystopian, near-future satire about near-total corporate control over our lives. It’s part 1984, part Minority Report, and often sarcastic.

    It took me some pages to get used to her prose style, but it finally worked for me on a sound and sense level.

    The Beetle Corporation pretty much owns all the levers of power in the West. It’s kinda sorta a hybrid of Apple, Google, Amazon, and more. Smart houses, smart cars, your fridge talks to you, you wear a Beetle watch, AI assistants guide you through your day . . . and everything is predictable according to Beetle’s algorithms (“lifechains”), including future crimes. People are routinely arrested and jailed for them.

    Until . . . someone murders his family and things start to break down. Those assistants go a bit bonkers. Zed floods the system.

    A coupla shadowy groups try to screw up the system. Hackers. Scientists racing to implement quantum computing, etc. etc.

    Really well done and thought-provoking, plus funny at times. I think it would make a great HBO series, though it would likely lose some of the interesting internal monologues, etc.

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