Feed by MT Anderson: The Novel Cure for screen addiction

This novel will make you want to pull out the plugs and head for the hills while you still can

Ailment: Screen addiction

Cure: Feed by MT Anderson

For some, the Christmas holiday means quality time with the family. For others, it means time with a quality screen. If you have spent more time engaging with people virtually than face-to-face over the Christmas period, insert a copy of MT Anderson's Feed between the screen and your nose. Set in a near future where computers exist inside our bodies, this novel will make you want to pull out the plugs and head for the hills while you still can.

Titus and his friends Marty, Calista and Link (the latter cloned from the DNA of Abraham Lincoln, no less) are spending spring break on the moon – as you do – to check out the "meg fun" to be had in the "low-grav" Ricochet Lounge. But also to meet girls. It'd be nice, Titus thinks, to have "someone to download with", so that it's not always just him and "the feed".

The feed is the constant delivery, straight into the brain, of information and adverts selected on the basis of your shopping history, the music you've listened to, the people you've met. Titus does meet someone with whom to share his feed: a girl named Violet, who does sexy things with a mouthful of juice in the low-grav café. But while they're dancing, a hacker touches their necks and they wake up in hospital to find their feed turned off. With no idea how to function without it, and freaked out by the absence of chatter, at first they just stare at the walls.

Titus recovers; Violet doesn't. Though back on, her feed is increasingly dysfunctional, and she becomes keenly aware of all they have lost in this sensually buffered world. Living in underground domes on a lifeless planet, the forests having been razed to make space for "air factories", Violet yearns for ways to feel intellectually and emotionally alive. Brilliantly, this book brings the future and its lingo right into our heads, the old-fashioned way, and reminds us to cherish the reality we are lucky enough to still have.

thenovelcure.com