“[An] insightful, unsettling look at how technology impacts our lives. . .Kavenna has skillfully made our present feel like dystopian fiction.” USA TODAYNamed a Best Book of 2020 by USA TODAY From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writing comes a blistering, satirical novel about life under a global media and tech corporation that knows exactly what we think, what we want, and what we … think, what we want, and what we do—before we do.
One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm . . . now what to do with all these messy people?
Lionel Bigman is dead. Murdered by a robot. Guy Matthias, the philandering founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Beetle, insists it was human error. But was it? Either the predictive algorithms of Beetle’s supposedly omniscient ‘lifechain’ don’t work, or, they’ve been hacked. Both scenarios are impossible to imagine and signal the end of Beetle’s technotopia and life as we know it.
Dazzlingly original and darkly comic, Zed asks profound questions about who we are, what we owe to one another, and what makes us human. It describes our moment—the ugliness and the beauty—perfectly. Kavenna is a prophet who has seen deeply into the present—and thrown back her head and laughed.
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Zed is brilliant dystopian insanity on a grand scale, describing a world of corporate pretenders, broken software, and algorithms that never quite work as well as they’re supposed to. Hilarious, incisive, and painfully relevant.
3.75s rounded up to 4. I honestly don’t even know how to begin to review this book. A work of dystopian fiction, Zed is quite funny, more than a bit sad, like “aww… bless their hearts” sad (& for those of you who don’t speak southern that means: those poor dumb/otherwise impaired people),not need a box of tissues sad, slightly terrifying and crazy.
In the very near future, Beetle is the huge tech company that runs the world. Literally. It’s the NSA, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc., etc., all rolled into one & on steroids. People drive beetle made smart cars, actually the smart cars drive the people. Beetle-bits are the only accepted currency, everyone has their own Beetle personal assistant that can come in both real-fake bodies and a disembodied voice on their Beetle-bands (which everyone has to wear on their wrists in order to do anything in society, like work & buy things), appliances and everything else. Beetle has cameras on every street, only to keep people safe (wink wink), and in every room in your house (again, solely for safety). Your Beetle fridge tells you if you’re eating right and that: ‘maybe you’d like a yogurt instead of that bacon for breakfast’, to keep you as healthy as you can be. Beetle owns the media, but there is no bias and reporters, or robo-hacks, can still write whatever they want (wink, wink). Thanks to Beetle, the world is full of cities and copies of cities and copies of copies of cities that are all smart and PERFECT (wink, wink)! Beetle does your “lifechain”where you see exactly what decisions you will make and exactly what happens to you when you make them. That way the authorities can arrest people for future crimes so nothing bad ever happens anymore! Obviously, Beetle is all about the health and happiness of the people, nothing more or less (okay, do I need to keep saying: ‘wink wink?’ Or do you get it?)! Then Zed happens. What is Zed you ask? That is a great question. Zed is bad. That we know. Zed events cause the lifechains to go wonky as things happen that weren’t predicted. People do things for unknown reasons, the personal assistants go just as crazy as real people and all because of Zed.
Like I said, this book was quite funny and also a bit scary as some of it hit a bit close to home in the age of technology we live in, which I’m pretty sure was the point (I catch on fast) but surely this could and would never happen… wink wink?? It was a bit like reading the thoughts of someone high on shrooms while riding ‘ it’s a small world’ at times, but it was meant to be that way, so even those slightly confusing, all over the place parts were funny and easy to get through. This was my first Joanna Kavenna book but it won’t be my last. I won an ARC of this book in giveaway.