Archive for the ‘Seanan McGuire’ Category
Feed, by Mira Grant
Posted on: August 24, 2012
Feed, by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire)
published in 2010
where I got it: library
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Feed isn’t a zombie book. It’s an anti-fear, anti-stupid, pro-truth and pro-common sense story that’s cleverly disguised as a zombie book. It’s a story about the power of information, the power of censorship, and the paralyzing power of fear. The obsession with security and blood testing is a mirror held up to our fears of terrorism, catching diseases, and general anxiety about, well, everything. At times, Feed reminded me of some recent Cory Doctorow books, and that’s also a good thing. Also, I find the title highly amusing as some nice wordplay on what the zombie virus makes a (dead) person do, and what we call a chronological listing of blog updates.
Feed is my first zombie book, so I could be completely wrong thinking most zombie books take place during the zombie outbreak, and focus on survival. The first trick that Mira Grant flawlessly pulls off is setting her story nearly a generation after the original zombie outbreak. We’re twenty some years into it, and cities have strict security, blood testing for the virus is nearly everywhere, and society seems to run on a healthy dose of government promoted fear.
In Mira Grant’s future Earth, it was the combination of two supposedly harmless viruses that caused the zombie apocalypse. Trick number two that she pulls off is medical infodumps that are actually interesting. Bah interesting, they are downright fascinating. Everyone is infected with a sleeping version of the virus, and when you die, the virus comes alive, reanimating you.
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