Synopsis: Titus is just an average kid in the greenhouse-shrouded suburbs. He and his friends go clubbing on the moon and chat each other through the feed; an implant that permanently links their brains to all the wonders of the internet. If anything really cool happens to them, they send each other the memories as an email attachment.

Then Titus meets Violet, a girl who sees something less-than-benevolent in the feed, and whose feed may in fact be killing her. The romance that ensues between Titus and Violet is told through Titus' own, often brutally honest, remembrances.

Review: In one sense, Feed is an affecting, but unremarkable drama of teenage romance, and this is its triumph. Within a subtly-realised dystopia, Anderson weaves a story that is almost brilliant in its banality and staggering in its emotional truth; nothing is missing but a rocket launcher.

By telling a tale which – in the best convention of dystopian fiction – has no real conclusion and in which the world is not shaken by the characters' actions, Anderson has created a shockingly powerful novel, which reads like a digital-age, teenage version of 1984, but without the upbeat ending.

Feed is undeniably a part of the cyberpunk genre, but eschews the usually corny overtones of the type to dance, like the eternal fool, on the very brink of the hardest edge of science fiction. It is not one for the young and certainly not a book to read if you are feeling low and lonely, but feed is well worth the emotional effort involved in the reading.

2007-02-10