Better fed

Let me recommend a science fiction book. It's by M. T. Anderson and is called Feed. A young adult novel, it was recommended to me in 2004 by a friend who starts her course on "Buddhism and the Environment" with it - even though it's not about Buddhism or environment. It's that good, an amazing feat of futuristic imagination and social criticism which also resonates with the experiences of young people. It shows why the sorts of analyses Buddhist and environmentalist thinkers offer may be necessary, if we are to avoid ending up like the human manatees in "WALL-E." It's also beautifully written, and heartbreaking. Read it at your peril - it'll get under your skin. I dare say it's literature, and prophecy.

I mention it today not because I reread it, but because I just read another science fiction novel (a Hugo Award-winning novel likened in blurbs to Snow Crash, no less!) which seems like a pale imitation of Feed. Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End (2006) takes on some things Anderson doesn't, like multiple player computer games, and most of the story takes place in and around my old haunt, Geisel Library at UCSD (he writes from the world of programmers). But there are considerable overlaps, and in all of these Anderson goes deeper. Feed is more perceptive and more inventive - what the best science fiction requires, since the inventions teach us how to see the present more perceptively. Vinge imagines software called ForgetIt and web vandals for hire known as the Friends of Privacy, but Anderson invents a whole youth-language and sees privatized clouds and the way constant access to the internet would open our personalities to being commodified by advertisers. And since I've mentioned "WALL-E," Buy & Large could be in Feed, but is smarter than anything in Rainbows End.