Zed

Intelligent, prescient, scary, sometimes silly but mostly very funny. Original, well-organized and plotted but loses its way a bit towards the end – should probably have been shortened and sharpened by some judicious editing. But everyone should read it and take it to heart – the world is definitely headed in this direction! Lots of the technology is already in place and being used – look no further than China and Cambridge Analytica.

This is a novel written off the back of a single idea, and the author can't pull it off. A plot needs development, and identifiable characterisation, or at the least an outcome. For me this was missing all of this.

An interesting read which I recommend. Sort of science fiction, but set in the near future with technology which is all too close to what we have. It paints a world I fear and many of us like frightening ourselves with a vision of a future hell. This book is a new twist on a dystopian future. The author does rather run out of steam towards the end. The book is really one good idea ... but how to finish the yarn is a problem. Never mind the idea is good.

it's interesting for about 15% of the book - I bought the Kindle version for 99p - but then it's just more of the same techno-babble trying to fit into a story which really didn't have much story to tell. I gave up at that point.

If you want an easy read with realistic characters and a simple plot then you've come to the wrong author. If you prefer originality, verve, substance and exquisite writing then this is a novel for you. Kavenna has created a dystopia for our time, a world in the stranglehold of global tech giants and surveillance technology. Like all great dystopian fiction it's intellectually challenging but also hugely entertaining - a comic, surreal nightmare, simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. The idiosyncratic style embodies the disturbing messages while increasing the fun. For me, Kavenna as a dystopian satirist is right up there with Swift, Kafka, Orwell and Philip K. Dick. It's a great read.

Tackles the growing debate about algorithms and the use of personal data by the state to control it’s citizens in an entertaining way. Be afraid as much of what she writes is either already here or just around the corner!

I so rarely give up on books, but 150 pages of this drivel was enough for me.It meanders into what it thinks is a witty tangent every other paragraph to distract from the fact that there isn't much plot. What results is an unoriginal, boring mess that isn't nearly as clever as it thinks it is.

This book was an incredibly hard one with which to keep slogging on. It has an interesting premise that draws on today's issues and takes the strength of the IT megacorporations and extends that to a point at which society is over-run by algorithms and machines. I was reminded of the Terminator films where the machines take over, of Philip K Dick's Minority Report in which people can be prosecuted for what they will do in future but haven't yet done, and of course the Google - Amazon - Apple superpowers and their Chinese equivalents are seldom far from the front of mind.The problem is that a clever idea will only take you so far if you've got an absurd rambling plot that rarely makes much sense and completely relies on the author being able to change the rules as she goes along. The mysterious 'Zed' stands for all the uncontrollable, unpredictable things that can't be managed by systems alone. In short, it's chaos.The book takes some interesting ideas and then rambles about all over the show without really developing anything that you could really call plot or characters. I didn't care about any of the people in this book - except perhaps the victims of Zed, Sally Bigman in particular. The rest were hard to like since you barely know if they're real or virtual characters. The blurring of reality and fantasy is so entrenched that nothing really feels like it matters at all.As for the ending......it really did nothing at all for me, other than making me wish I'd followed my instincts and given up a LOT earlier when my instincts told me this just wasn't worth the time and effort.