The Future

Thought provoking glimpses of the past and future intertwined with todays dystopian technology and self righteous thinking . A great read !

This is a very clever and insightful book about the near future. For much of its length it looks dystopian, until suddenly it's not. There are clues at various places that things are not as they seem, but they are a bit subtle, and you might miss them if not paying close attention. I don't want to be a spoiler, but you really have to read it all the way through to fully appreciate what the author is doing here. The social commentary is sharp indeed.One thing that sucked me into it from early on, is that when I tried to put it down (we all have to eat sometime), it was like waking up from a dream, where you're in that twilight state of mind where you are trying to separate the dream from reality, wondering if you're really awake. It all seems so real, that it is easy to visualize the leaders of the biggest tech companies thinking and behaving in exactly this way, especially since they often do the exact things described here.The author must have read Piketty, and thought about the implications of unchecked inequality and billionaires left to their own devices, unable to separate the public good from their own greed and insecurity. The reader is invited to see things occasionally from the billionaire's perspective, how they might believe they are behaving responsibly when the reality is just the opposite. Everyone makes mistakes, but the billionaire's mistakes are magnified a billion-fold by their unimaginable wealth.The plot is a little complex, best read during a holiday or vacation when you have time to binge all the way through it. The moral of the story is that a small group of concerned people can change the world. As I gather with my children this holiday season, I sure hope that part isn't a dream.

Love this author and this book was so interesting and brought up many questions for our own future! 🤔

You will like this if you're into lesbian sex, social interactions, dialogue, internal monologues, characters' back stories, and obscenity: there are 213 ducks in the novel, about one per page.You won't like this if you're into science, technology, plot, far horizons and adventure. I bought this because Alastair Reynolds praised it, but I can't see why.

“In terms of saving the whole planet, what is the smallest number of people you’d need to get rid of to move the needle? What is the smallest number of lies? …The question is how many unintended casualties are too many…whether there might be one good man in Sodom.” (p390, 391)This is a rich, intricate story that was fun to read. It felt to me like the literary equivalent of those old time theatrical melodramas where the audience hoots and boos raucously at the actors. It’s a chance to cheer for geeks trying to code their way to a better world; for prescient, skilled preppers who can smell the threat and are ready for it; for activists who claim the moral high ground; for smart, powerful women taking on the neo-patriarchy. And we all get to hiss at the fictitious antagonists who are thinly veiled proxies for the real world rich (and recognizable) power brokers who run the tech empires that we all love, hate, and fear.There are many moments of thoughtful and sometimes surprising social commentary. There’s also a memorable scene that walks readers through a famous sixties-era experiment (matchbox tic-tac-toe) to demonstrate in a non-technical way how machine learning works. But overall the book isn’t particularly deep. It’s an adventure story, and it’s a good one.Important heads up: don’t quit reading too soon. There’s a final section to the story – a “many years later” afterword – that surprisingly comes after the author’s acknowledgements.If you like this book you might also enjoy Megan Angelo’s “Followers”.