I’m a big fan of dystopian novels because I truly think everybody should wake up and smell the roses before it’s too late. However, good classic dystopian novels are unfortunately few and far between. If you think it’s hard creating individual believable dysfunctional characters, imagine the difficulty of creating entire believable dysfunctional societies in just a few hundred pages.

Yet such an monumental achievement can be written, typically with sci-fi themes. The first is of course the unforgettable 19th Century classic The Time Machine, followed in subsequent decades by We in the 1920s and Brave New World in the 1930s. The leader of the dystopian pack is of course 1984, which in the 1940s invented the “Orwellian” framework that is applied as a yardstick to all the dystopian classics that follow in its towering footsteps.  These have seemed to continue coming about once a decade – Fahrenheit 451 in the 1950s, A Clockwork Orange in the 1960s, The Shockwave Rider in the 1970s.  In the past quarter century “dystopian” has become intertwined and almost synonomous with “cyberpunk“, starting with the Neuromancer series of books in the 1980s and reaching jaw-dropping heights in the 1990s with one of most thoughtful and best science fiction novels ever written (dystopian or not): Snow Crash.

Well, Happy New Year! Now it’s the 21st Century and time to start looking for the next classic dystopian world.  Sure, the primitive futuristic universe of Firefly / Serenity is a lock for the title but that’s a video representation.  I think I’ve found the next literary classic dystopian novel by accident while walking through the bookstore, attracted by its minimalist yet perfect cover art showing the back of a bald kid’s head.  And so I have come to know the world of Feed by M. T. Anderson, a vision of a dynamic, dying America seen through the eyes, er, feeds of its teenagers.  This work is FAR more than just another knock-off juvenile sci-fi novel whether classified as postcyberpunk (by other reviewers) or not (by me).  Feed was a Finalist for the 2002 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature and an Honor book for the 2003 Horn Book Award in Fiction. It’s a book about tomorrow’s kids that should be read by today’s parents. Best of all, it’s actually being read by those who need to read it the most.

Unit, Feed is meg.  Jack in.