This is one of the most frightening novels I have ever read – a horror story that just stops you in your tracks and makes you keep looking round at people doing now what they do in the story. 

Yet, there is no blood and gore, no murders or monsters, no chainsaws or cannibals.  It is about computers. 

Feed is set in the future, but not too far ahead, because all the main features of its society are with us already.  The key feature, the Feed of the title, is a brain implant that gives people total internet access for their life.  Walk into a shop and you get its website talking to your brain, suggesting this week’s specials.  In a conversation with a group, you can text one of them (or anyone else) privately. Lie in bed checking your day’s email. 

The possibilities for thought and communication and understanding ought to be limitless.  But the horrifying reality of Feed is that information becomes an endless parade of sales catalogues and advertorials, personal communication is reduced to the intellectual level of an SMS text message, and life becomes a trivial succession of fashion experiences. 

Think of all society being lived as the Big Brother house, no-one going anywhere or doing anything, just waiting for the next thrill to be delivered by the big corporations that run the world.  You never actually feel your own emotions, you download them. 

Titus, the central character, tells the story in the slang of his time which is, like, not uncool from ours, you know, like. He is a typical teenager of the time until he meets Violet who actually questions whether the Feed is the best of all possible lives (as the advertising keeps telling him). 

The story tracks the eventual disasters that this questioning brings, after an encounter with a hacker (now, that is a frightening concept when the computer is in your brain!).  There are various themes running as undercurrents – honesty in relationships, the USA’s conspicuous consumption, acceptance of environmental destruction if there is a profit in it – but it is the triviality of life through the internet that builds the real horror. 

Feed is very good science fiction because all the key parts are in our lives now.  It is frightening because its story is just a few short steps away.

Review by David Beagley

© 2004 David Beagley