Feed

M.T Anderson

Set in the near future, Feed is a sci-fi tale of a group of adolescents, namely the main character, Titus, and his love interest, Violet, and how their world is turned upside-down by one lone hacker one night in a club… on the moon.The premise of the novel is a logical continuation of today’s society, combining marketing, advertising, the internet and biometrics to form the Feed, a computer integrated into everyone’s brains, that projects data from the net into the mind as related articles arise in real life.Feed succeeds in brilliantly encapsulating the rational side of sci-fi. The book is narrated in the first person by Titus himself  via a mix of modern vocabulary (with different connotations to the ones they have today) and futuristic slang, that chimes of the techniques used by Anthony Burgess is A Clockwork Orange.I would recommend Feed wholeheartedly to all my contemporaries, as, as well as being an interesting concept, the book carries substance with a brilliant storyline, that certainly had me hooked. I would also recommend reading some of Anderson’s other works as well as Feed (he wrote a brilliant short story for the book ‘Steampunk’, which I reviewed last year) as he has a way of sparking your imagination with his work.

- Reviewed by A.G Phillips

Boonie

Richard Masson

Set in a harsh world where water comes as a rare commodity scratched from the ground, Boonie by Richard Masson tells of a small boy’s attempts to traverse the Dry Marshes and find his mother in the vast depths of the City. Meeting several peculiar characters on his journey, such as the old man whose sits by a tree with his mouth sewn shut, JD soon learns the ways of the wilds, and must use these skills to escape the likes of the Silver Men.

A well thought through storyline, I personally like Boonie, although I think it is rather aiming too high when it comes to age range; Hot Key Press marking it as 12+. Boonie is, like many other Sci-Fi novels, set in the future, unsurprisingly in a post-apocalyptical world lacking the correct amount of that precious H₂O. This predictability would be a letdown, if it wasn’t for the characters built up throughout the tale. Godrum, the old man alluded to earlier, is hardly a character found often in a book.

As well as the characters, the book is a good way of getting young kids into a whole array of high-class prose. Boonie chimes of Science Fiction works such as ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ by Philip K. Dick, and the use of colloquialism when writing from the main character’s perspective could be an easing-in to the likes of ‘Kes’ by Barry Hines.

Overall, Boonie is a good starter novel if you are just getting into the world of Sci-Fi, and is well worth picking off the shelf.

Reviewed by Aleks Philips