Well, after one season to have forgotten, I think it's time to revisit this blog. The truth is that lately I had not been tempted to review anything. There was nothing that seduced me to write in the meantime and revisiting classic remake of a lifetime is being produced these days (mental note: one day I have to talk about it), and moreover, I find that I have too many items talking about film and literature of the 80, 70 and even beyond this blog. I felt the need to talk about something new, but nothing really enticed me. I confess, I stopped into laziness. So I told myself it was time to write something, anything. So I take the opportunity to discuss the penultimate fashion fantasy novel, which I have recently fallen into the hands, and that tendency seems to confirm the revival of apocalyptic genre that I've watched in recent years. Will be about 2012, but in the end I will have to swallow what I said long ago about the death of the genre. In short, the subject. Extras
of Scott Westerfeld, a fashion names of fantasy literature of recent times. An author who started the cyberpunk, it happened after the space-opera, and has recently admitted to the universe as profitable as they call fantasy youth (new mental note: this one also I have to talk someday.) Extras is a kind of epilogue to his successful Uglies Trilogy, in which the universe is based, although it is an independent novel, you can read and understand without having read the other books. For those not familiar with the aforementioned trilogy, but are interested in this book, suffice it to say that the rise and fall is a classic dystopian society in a post-apocalyptic no less classic. The three pillars of this dystopia are: the cult of beauty, and of course cyborgización, brainwashing. It is the only reference in the series need to understand this new novel. Extras
stands
years later the collapse of this dystopia, and shows that the disappearance of the previous corrupt regime has not automatically brought a release, but new forms of thought control. The characters also change, a new generation has grown, and the protagonists of the earlier books are now luxury side of the story. Personally, I prefer this novel to the trilogy itself said. Maybe you prefer to read stories that begin and end in one take, without thinking of continuing, much as the serial is an invention as old as literature itself, but also because this book covers in my opinion in less space more than the three previous issues.
this book also raises several interesting issues. On the one hand is the central economic issue of reputation. The idea that in a society where money is not your good name can become legal tender currency, technology and strict rules for real-time numerical measure had been proposed by Cory Doctorow in "Touching Bottom" in 2003 pero han tenido que pasar otros 5 años (el original ingles de Extras es de 2008, aunque aquí, como de costumbre, nos llega con retraso) para que un concepto tan interesante vuelva a ser explorado en la ci-fi. En el mundo de Extras, ser popular equivale a ser rico, y al revés, el anonimato implica marginación. Por consiguiente, los ciudadanos de esta nueva distopía compiten constantemente en busca de la fama, a cualquier precio, lo cual nos plantea un segundo tema de interés, la fama como fenómeno en si mismo, el valor de ser famoso.
Otros temas que aborda plenamente son el fenómeno del “ciudadano reportero”, y con ello, también el de la ética periodística. En ese mundo futuro ubiquitous technology, with people constantly connected to information networks, maintaining and checking the futuristic equivalent of blogs as you read this, the shortest path to stardom is to shoot the news, be the first to discover the new urban trend, and sounding the alert. While this may sometimes involve the use of trickery to get the noticia.Dicho all this, it is easy to see that this seemingly simple story about a student who, following a gang of futuristic urban surfers by chance clothing speaks of a conspiracy subjects which are already fully present in the world today. The cult of fame is ubiquitous today. And it as long we have been watching what is being said on Twitter or YouTube is so important in daily newspapers and news as sources of life. Good science fiction is what leads us into the future to speak of this. And this novel, no doubt, get it ... besides being a really absorbing story of action.
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