catvalente

Seeing as how I am at Readercon, I do believe it's time for a book review. This time? Feed, by Mira Grant, who plays seanan_mcguire  on TV.

Full disclosure--the author is a friend of mine. This does not affect my judgment, trust.

Because check it out: Feed is zombie book. Y'all know I am not a zombie girl except for when I am except for when Augusta pisses me off. It's not my trope. Not for me. On top of that? Feed is a political zombie book. Dude, I didn't even like to listen to politicians during the election in the real world. I was excited for this book because I know Smira is a good writer and a horror wunderkind, but it kind of started in the hole with me on subject matter.

One of the best things I can say about this book is that it made me uncomfortable in the exact way that real politics make me uncomfortable. She nailed the politico slightly insincerely sincere voice perfectly.

The plot? Bloggers are hired to follow the Republican candidate for president some 40 years after the zombie apocalypse. A full society is in swing that knows how to deal with zombies but is still plagued by them. It's fascinating stuff. There is a conspiracy. Things bite other things. There are, I shit you not, both zombie palominos and zombie moose. This is unassailably awesome.

Now, I have to be fair. Some things bothered me about the book. For 40 years in the future, the thrill and edginess of the blogging world and concern for its legitimacy feels a little retro--blogging is pretty much legitimate news now, and Obama hired bloggers to work for his campaign. It's not quite futury enough to be the future. The blogging revolution has already been and gone, and blogging is even a little passe these days, except for political blogging. I still can't quite get why that battle would still be being fought. Twitter breaks the news now. Of course it would break the apocalypse, and of course people trust it more than TV news. (Though I did dig the aggregate site-culture she posits.) I did wish the Democratic candidate had been treated as a genuine opponent, and thought the Republican dude was...overly optimistic at best. His views are pretty liberal for an elephant, and it didn't quite ring true. The comments about the other Republican candidate being a bimbo who got that far on her cleavage kind of rubbed me the wrong way--though I assumed it to be Palin satire.

But oh my god does she deliver the science. There is a ton of virology nattering here that satisfies my desire for what I call Whyporn--I want to know everything about everything, especially when trying to make a trope like zombies real. And the parts where our erstwhile narrator Georgia Mason tells us how it all went down and how you stay safe? Gold.

And so I cruised toward the end of this book being sort of squeamish about the politics because I am allergic to campaigns and liking the Whyporn, but not loving this book, just thinking it was pretty solid.

And then we get to the end. And the end is why I can't forget the book, and why I'll read the sequel. Unfortunately, it's a HUGE spoiler, and it's pretty much impossible to talk about it without spoiling it. But I'm going to try, because I want people who haven't read it to still be able to hear why I loved it.

As with most zombie books, someone dies at the end. It's a gut-punch, and a writer with the sheer gall to pull that trick is someone you seriously cannot leave alone with your stuff. So someone dies, bitten by a zombie. And they have about 30 minutes before they go full braaaaiins on everyone. And after saying goodbye to loved ones, what do they do?

They blog.

And this rang so fucking true to me I can't even tell you. They blog and it's not a joke, it's not look at these kids today and how shallow they are. It'sa cry in the night, a final witness, a determination to be one's own last record, to make one's voice last as long as possible.

It is what I would do.

And to see that treated seriously, as even a heroic thing, it just blindsided me. Our social network is so often treated as a symptom of my generation sucking, but I know, and you know that it's more, it's voices and connections and love and safety in numbers, and the deal is that it will save you if you feed it, if you give it of yourself and your heart and soul. If you are brave enough to let it be a part of you, it will give you the world. But you have to feed it. It is a loved one, too, and you can't ask of it and not pay your due. And instead of crying about their fate or demanding to be shot (because in Feedworld that's a given), this character turns to that invisible world and leaves their last testament, and it's some powerful shit, I tell you what.

Sometimes it's just one thing that means a book stays important to you for a long time. Sometimes that's all it takes. There's more than one thing in this book, but that's what bit me as I was trying to run in the dark, and amplified my heart.