Picked up this book after my local B&N didn’t have the one I was looking for, and I’m glad I stumbled upon this. On top of containing notes of Vonnegut, Orwell, I’ll also throw in Maxx Barry’s Syrup for good measure – science fiction that is unflinching in imagining the worst blend of advertising and human nature, yet finds hopeful stories of humanity in the almost post-apocalyptic fallout of a culture totally consumed with, well, consumption.
During the first few chapters, you might find some of the ideas preposterous – hijacking people’s vocal biology to artificially spread word of mouth, genetically engineering bizarre creatures or shooting deceased loved ones to fall from the sky – but Magnason weaves the fabric of this world so expertly before long you accept them as normal, and I caught myself laughing at the absurdity of some of the lengths the characters were forced to go to.
Even though this was written far before Facebook, Twitter, and all the other places we wirelessly communicate with the world, the vision of a future where we are all tapped to recommend products to each other based upon mountains of data isn’t that far off from the reality we have ended up in. While we don’t live in the world of absolute calculations and a single monolithic corporation, it doesn’t take much of an imagination to draw parallels between the themes of this book to our current world. I was also pleasantly surprised by the translation – had I not known this was first written in Icelandic going in, the beauty of this book was not lost in being converted to English.