There are already a bunch of good, high profile books here so I’ll throw one in that’s a little less known. Feed by M.T. Anderson is a great cyberpunk dystopia. It shows the perils of ab America completely bought out by corporate interests, with government basically surrendering its functions to them. Schools are sponsored by companies, the oceans are so polluted hardly anything lives in them anymore, and everyone has a VR brain implant that basically acts as a more addictive form of TikTok.
This book was written well before smartphones and social media propaganda was a thing and it’s rather striking how accurately it portrays modern day society in a lot of ways. Considering we’re not quite at the dystopian level described in the story yet it’s more of a cautionary tale of what can come.
There are already a bunch of good, high profile books here so I’ll throw one in that’s a little less known. Feed by M.T. Anderson is a great cyberpunk dystopia. It shows the perils of ab America completely bought out by corporate interests, with government basically surrendering its functions to them. Schools are sponsored by companies, the oceans are so polluted hardly anything lives in them anymore, and everyone has a VR brain implant that basically acts as a more addictive form of TikTok.
This book was written well before smartphones and social media propaganda was a thing and it’s rather striking how accurately it portrays modern day society in a lot of ways. Considering we’re not quite at the dystopian level described in the story yet it’s more of a cautionary tale of what can come.
I read this in 2011, the same year I got my first iPhone and started teaching in a middle school.
Yeah, things have trended dystopian and proven this book prophetic in many, many ways