A very brief review from April 17, 2005....
I have just finished this fun fast-paced novel of not-so-far future. There are no more taxes, Police and NRA are security companies for hire, and Government investigates only if you can pay for it. Nobody seems to be able to recognize the US President when he appears in public, but CEOs of conglomerates are celebrities of sorts. It is a libertarian dream....and a logical outcome of such ideology is anarchy, and that is why every friggin' idiotic libertarian small-government, anti-tax, "free-market", gun-toting moron has to be forced to read this book as punishment for stupidity.
Perhaps you thought that 1984 (Orwell), Brave New World (Huxley), Man In High Castle (Dick) and Space Merchants (Pohl & Kornbluth) did not really predict the future accurately, though I would say that those four COMBINED get pretty close. If you want it all in just one volume, read "Jennifer Government". Funny, as I was reading it I was thinking about comparisons to Space Merchants (and The War Of The Merchants). A few pages later, a character picks up a copy of "Space Merchants" and does not like it because of its ironic tone: "There was no place for irony in marketing: it made people want to look for deeper meaning. There was no place in marketing for that, either".
Apparently, a movie is in the making. Max Barry has a good website with a lot of additional information and one part of it allows comments so it is, in fact, a blog.
Comments
I love this book. There is also a really cool website which has taken a life of its own. Its called NationStates---you create a country in a "world" make decisions, care for the people...a lot of fun. www.nationstates.net
Posted by: Shelley Batts | August 25, 2006 3:13 PM