The book starts out really well and strong. Though I wasn't entirely sure who I was supposed to be plumping for, each character had their own sadness.
There's a tech background to the book that I've seen face to face, not the AI/sentient bits, but the constant tracking and the BS fobbing off that people in tech (who mostly don't understand their tech) use. Certainly for the first half of the book I found myself chuckling away.
The story and outlook is pretty bleak: all privacy lost, super corp tracks your every move and uses that information to then manipulate your decisions. Pretty much what we face today, in the early 20s, with Google and Facebook.
For me, I felt like the book started to lose it's momentum around halfway and it felt like the story was stagnating. I wasn't really sure how the antagonist actually ties up with the story, or even if indeed the were the/an antagonist.
It also felt to me like it ended abruptly without really being able to say anything. Which might be because we already like in a world where super corp does indeed hold our privacy to random and there's really no escaping it and even then in the face of criminal behaviour (see Brexit campaign and Trump) there's no recourse that the either the law can apply or society seems to want to see actioned. That's to say: it's pretty messed up.
7 Highlight(s)
Alas, within the free market it is not permitted to trade freely in any place you choose, and these people were of course prosecuted for trading without a licence.
Meanwhile, Strachey tried to decide whether to jump (into the abyss) or whether to stand at the edge (and be pushed into the abyss) or whether to tiptoe back from the edge of the abyss (hoping no one noticed where he had been and also that no one would push him in later anyway).
just need a yes or no answer,' said Guy. 'Only just! Nothing is ever only just!' said Sarah Coates.
The point was made across all the free media. Nothing you are told is real. Remember this, until we tell you that something you are being told is real. Actually, the thing we are telling you, that nothing you are told is real, is actually real. That thing is real, about nothing being real. Just that thing though and nothing else. Is that clear?
Furthermore, in order to protect the nation from any further security violations in protest against mass surveillance, the Government would, naturally, be obliged to enhance its mass surveillance program further.
She hoped to capsize the world, and make everything lowermost that was uppermost.
It was her mind that was broken, rather than the reality beyond her. Yet, how would she tell?