A Cautionary Tale of a Frightening Future – 5 stars
Welcome to a country in the very near future where your every movement is tracked through your phone, vehicle license tags, and even your household appliances. Your children, if you’ve been approved to have any, are enrolled in a school run by the corporation for which you work with an approved standardized curriculum, which in turn is based on a caste system dependent on your position in that corporation. Your calorie intake is monitored and you may only eat foods from approved corporate sources. And no one is being taught how to read or write, only how to interact with pictographs, videos, and icons. That is the world described in this book as we follow the attempts of an underground movement to combat the enslavement of the population that has happened when the government turns over control to the largest global corporations.
Think about it. We’re already hearing of school systems that are no longer teaching cursive writing and only teaching what it takes to pass standardized tests. We’re being tracked via GPS locators in cell phones and other mobile devices; vehicles often have GPS units and tracking services such as OnStar or EZPass. We give up our private information in order to get deals and discounts with store and loyalty cards that track purchases and preferences.
This book takes all of this and extrapolates a time where illiteracy is the law and everyone is simply a tool of the corporate structure to be controlled and tracked. The members of the underground and their methods of fighting back are the stars of the story though. Flashbacks on the backgrounds of the key members of this group explain how and why they have come to be the backbone of the organization and the ways they each fight back in their own unique, non-violent ways.
The story can be taken either as a thought-provoking warning to be more careful of what we’re giving up in order to enjoy the fruits of modern society or simply as an engaging and inventive tale with interesting characters. I choose to take it as the former and will be recommending it to friends and acquaintances to read as such. Whichever way you choose to look at it, the book is well worth the reader’s time.
Normally I would deduct a star for the overwhelming number of typos, punctuation problems, and grammar errors in this book, but I’m making an exception in this case because of the importance of the story being told.
Strongly recommended.