Ads R Us by Claire Carmichael
She has done it again! Somehow Claire Carmichael can take current technology trends and project slightly into the future and come up with a great adventure story that doesn’t sound trite, or date too quickly. Most SciFi writers look at the distant future, it is much harder to look just around the corner.
I first encountered this style of writing from her with her Virtual Realities series. Remember when the media was all about how computer games were going to become all encompassing environments. Well in this series of books Carmichael suggests that a virtual reality monster becomes able to enter our reality and creats havoc.
In Ads R Us, Carmichael looks at current communications technologies. She proposes that in a few years phones, computers, TVs and all the other individual technologies will amalgamate into one general personal communicator. And to keep the service affordable to everyone, the communications are mostly continuous adverts. Naturally the advertisors will want maximum exposure, so the personal communicator can never be turned off.
Into this environment, drop a young man who has been raised in a Ludite farming community. Suddenly everyone sees him as a perfect test case to assess the effectiveness of the advertising. And so begins the adventure…
I see this book as a good introduction to SciFi for young readers who have not encountered the genre before. As with Carmichael’s other books, the environment is close enough to our own so that stark realists (and many young readers are) won’t be put off by the strangeness. However, some readers my find that the book takes too long to get to the action. There is a lot of scene setting, be warned.
