Goodreads Review: Feed

Feed by M.T. Anderson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This review contains spoilers.

This is where I eat my words.

I resisted Feed. It was recommended to me by several close friends, but I put off reading it and put off reading it for what I now realize were fairly shallow reasons–first, that it looked like such a boy book, and, secondly, because I feared that this would be like Uglies: filled with grating slang and the glittering veneer of SF conceits but without any substance beneath them.

I was so, so wrong. Because Feed wasn’t anything like Westerfeld’s more recent dystopian series. Instead, it hearkens back to earlier, more substantial speculative fiction aimed at adults–there are shades of A Clockwork Orange here, but mostly I couldn’t help but think of Philip K. Dick. Anderson’s future world gleams with a Dick-like intensity; it is well-rendered and foreign and yet utterly recognizable, but more importantly, and again as is the case in many of Dick’s novels, the emotional core of the book is what makes it transcendent.

At first, as is the case with Uglies, it’s the technology of Feed that stands out: set in a far future where humans live in domed enclosures and have internet advertising, called Feeds, zapped into their heads, it’s the story of Titus, a teenage boy who was never taught to question the world around him–or the one inside his skull. On the moon, Titus encounters Violet, a pretty, slightly unusual girl, and takes her to a club where both of their feeds are hacked. This is a minor inconvenience to Titus, but has terrible side-effects for Violet, leading her down a long road toward her eventual death.

The setting here is much more textured than the above probably implies–this isn’t a clean utopia, but rather a commercial empire built upon the death of our planet and humanity. Hints of this texture are given early on, in the earliest references to the mysterious lesions that have begun to plague teenagers. But as the novel proceeds, the reader begins to learn precisely how diseased the planet, and human society, truly is, in fits and starts and stolen glimpses. Anderson doesn’t condescend to his audience by stating the cause for all of this decay explicitly, but there’s enough here that it’s clear and implicit.

In a way, Feed is really a treatise on grief–Titus’ grief for the still-living Violet as she declines, the grief of both Violet and her father for all of their world–and an examination of how commercial society offers insufficient comfort in the face of death. It’s not insignificant that, when discussing things she would like to do in her short life, the only dream Violet can conjure that doesn’t come from a sitcom opening is visiting the sacrificial grounds of Mayan temples. The commercial society of Feed has no vocabulary for sacrifice, for horror, or for death.

This was truly a challenging, beautiful read, and I’d highly recommend it, not only for young readers, but for anyone interested in layered, complex science fiction.

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2:30 in the morning and my gas tank will be empty soon . . .

It’s nearly three a.m. on a Monday morning, and I will not be going to work tomorrow.

But the truth is, I don’t plan to go to work any time soon. A week ago, I turned down a completely fine offer for full time work. A job with benefits. Where I’d have perfectly nice co-workers, and a decent yearly salary.

I realized that I had a problem when I saw my voice mail early in the morning a few weeks ago, noted the phone number of the company in question’s HR department, knew, deep down, that they’d be calling with a job offer, then promptly went back to sleep and dreamed of getting turned down for the job. In my dreams, I was very, very happy.

Here, I have to note that I have a part-time job right now, one that is decently paying: I’m working from home doing grading for an educational testing company. It’s not thrilling work, and I won’t be rich, but it’s a living, or thereabouts, and it’s flexible work.

I asked them to give me time to think about the offer, and because they were generous, they did. So I thought about it, and asked for advice from those who know me on facebook.

Some of the responses:

work from home. no question about it. don’t even ask yourself again. just do it. i’d say this to virtually anyone weighing these option, but it especially applies to you.

More time home also gives you the time to work on art projects, which is better in the long run for you, I think.

Follow the ♥!

These people know me, so this advice meant the world. But that didn’t make the choice any less scary. Working full time has been the safe, mature, responsible decision in many respects–it’s meant security and stability. But it’s become increasingly untenable, if not just unpalatable, as I’ve gotten older, and particularly as my own writing’s become more and more important to me.

Because, when it comes down to it, no matter how fulfilling a job is, it will always just be a job to me. My work–my life and my passion–is my writing.

And my writing is enriched by other things that aren’t exactly job related: family, friends, road trips, television, music, art projects, adventures, long walks. And the only one of those things I’ve had time to work on over the past year was the walking thing, and only because I didn’t feel like paying for parking. Nearly all of my time was spent working, or writing. And it was frigging exhausting, and I can’t help but think that my writing–what really, really matters to me, the way that work matters for other people–suffered for it.

It’s been a week since I called up the very nice people who were kind enough to offer me work and turn them down. And right now, I’m at my mother’s house–a place I’ve visited only twice in eight months–and today I went to the city and the beach with my sister and my head is swarming with stories. I’ve realized that there’s something that urgently needs to be added to Seas Run Dry (I thought I was finished; perhaps not). And I’ve started to figure out not only the logistics of my new project, Trip, but also quite a bit about the characters and the settings. Individual scenes are beginning to materialize. It’s becoming palpable–a necessity for me to really be able to proceed. I’m itching to write, a feeling I haven’t had in awhile.

That’s not to say that pulling the plug on Full Time Work was easy. I’ll have to buy health insurance. I’ll have to perform well at my part-time job so that I can continue getting decent hours. I’ll have to manage a home office and not become a hermit.

But the worst part is the guilt, and the doubt. Despite Jewish upbringing, I was also raised with a strong pseudoprotestant work ethic. I worry that I might seem lazy, that my choice might be a self-indulgent one. I worry that it’s foolish to make such a choice without an agent, or a book deal, that with only a small handful of partials and fulls out I’m somehow tempting fate. I worry I worry I worry . . .

But still, I know that I have something that I want to share with the world. And I know that I need to honor it, and tend to it. I know that I can’t let it wither and die. This all sounds gradiose, I’m sure–though for some reason, it’s easier to make sweeping statements at three a.m., when one is sunburnt and sleepless. But I wanted to share these thoughts with you guys, as a sort of statement of intent, a manifesto, of sorts.

Way back when, my husband said, “It’s living in and writing your own story, and if it’s possible for you to do that, you should.” These words aren’t mine; I won’t tattoo them to my skin. But I’ll keep them in my heart and on my tongue, and I’ll do my best to be true to them. It’s that important to me.

Two for Tuesday: Tiny Teaser and Some Tunes

I haven’t been playing along with Teaser Tuesday in the past few weeks–too busy with queries and edits to get any real writing done. But a new project has been floating around on the back of my mind. I need to do some prewriting for it; this one is going to necessitate much more planning than any previous project. But one of my narrators was begging me to jump in last night, so I sat down and banged out an opening passage. Richie, take it away:

1 – Richie

It was the summer everything was fucked.

Like our cell phones, and the wifi. On the news they kept saying that it had something to do with solar flares. It was a hot kind of summer, rainless and blistering even in June, and after the sun went down I could almost see them—crimson tongues of the sun, searing out in curling waves into the black, black night, and I could almost believe it was true when I shouted into the phone, “No! Wait! Don’t!” and my own voice and a rush of static echoed back to me, and then a stuttered pause, and then Aadi, through laughter, said: “What? What? I can’t hear you! I’m coming over!”

And then I threw the phone down, and it bounced against my wallpaper, the stupid teddy bears in their baseball uniforms. And I got up and went to get dressed, feeling nauseous at the thought of it, at the thought of Aadi, of his soft lips and onyx hair.

Because I’d been having dreams for weeks. The kind you’re not supposed to have about your best friend. About Aadi. About his hands falling against my neck. About the way he looked in his boxer shorts, the lean line of his hips veering out of the elastic. About how it would feel when I crushed my chest against his.

Like I said, it was the summer everything was fucked.

I also came up with a little Seas Run Dry playlist this afternoon–it’s a summer soundtrack of music I love. Only a few of the songs are referenced even obliquely in the text, but I think it captures the mood of the book nicely. I’ll be up on the book’s page shortly, but I share it with you now, to get you in a summer mood before August ends.