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Alive or dead, the truth
won't rest. My name is Georgia Mason, and I'm begging you: Rise up while you
can. - Georgia Mason
I'm currently three-quarters
of the way through Feed by Mira Grant -- Orbit, 2010; nominated for a
Hugo. (She's Seanan McGuire, who's writing the October Daye series.) It's the
first of the Newsfeed trilogy of Feed, Deadline, and Blackout. A friend let me borrow the whole set, so I'm able to
read them beginning to end without having to wait for publication.
Feed is different from Seanan's other work.. I like it - it's definitely
Seanan's work, and I'm the opposite of disappointed. I enjoy her style and love
her sense of humor. I also like that she's not afraid of long blocks of
narrative - sometimes pages at a stretch - with no dialog whatsoever. I'm one
of those readers who doesn't need endless dialog to drive the narrative - it
gets redundant and boring and hard to follow. She uses dialog well: where it's
needed and makes it spare. Feed is
what happened when she got into a discussion with someone and had to answer the
question: What happens when you poke a
zombie with a stick?
Feed takes place twenty years after the Rising of 2014, when two
man-made viruses came together to form "Kellis-Amberlee" and infected
all mammalian life. Death causes the virus to "amplify" which
converts any mammalian host over forty pounds into a zombie. The irony here is
that the two viruses (the Kellis Flu and Marburg Amberlee) had been found to
cure the common cold and cancer, respectively.
After "the
drop", the virus infects everyone, so is inherent in their immune system.
Great boon -- until you die and convert. Kellis-Amberlee wants only one thing.
To feed itself so it can continue to
live and grow.
After "the
drop", traditional media outlets and politicians focus on what's "interesting"
as opposed to "what's good for you".
People in the streets
died while news anchors made jokes about people taking their zombie movies too
seriously and showed footage they claimed depicted teenagers "horsing
around" in latex and bad stage makeup...There was a war on, and the ones
whose responsibility it was to inform us wouldn't even admit we were fighting
it.
The youth of the nation
are fed up with this and take matters into their own hands: they take everything
they can online. These bloggers refuse to sit on the truth, filter the truth, or
sensationalize the truth. This is the raw, unadulterated news:
The "real"
news media was bound by rules and regulations, while bloggers were bound by
nothing more than the speed of their typing. We were the first to report that
people who'd been pronounced dead were getting up and noshing on their
relatives. We were the ones who stood up and said "yes, there are zombies,
and yes, they are killing people" while the rest of the world was buzzing
about the amazing act of ecoterrorism that released a half-tested "cure
for the common cold" into the atmosphere. We were giving tips on
self-defense when everybody else was barely beginning to admit there might be a
problem.
Blogs and other
non-traditional (new media) news outlets deliver the news and entertainment,
bloggers are recognized (and certified) as professional journalists. These are
divided into three groups: Newsies, Irwins, and Fictionals, all with their own
rambling branches of sub-groups. The Newsies are focused on fact-based
reporting. The Irwins (named for Steve Irwin) educate and entertain by
"poking things with sticks". The Fictionals provide fictional content
of all kinds -- just like the type we find on TV, in movies, and books today.
Feed is told by Georgia Mason as she and her brother Shaun and
their crew (all members of After the End Times newsblog) are hired
by the campaign of Republican Senator Peter Ryman. Things start going bad when
the campaign convoy is attacked during a stop in Eakly, Oklahoma. Camp security
is compromised along with an outbreak -- someone orchestrated this attack. Georgia
and her crew dedicate themselves to get to the bottom of the attack. Before
they can, bigger news happens. An outbreak occurs at the Senator's ranch,
killing his oldest daughter, her grandparents, and a number of the staff.
Georgia and her crew
acquire permission from the Senator to conduct their own investigation after
the ranch has gone through the decontamination process. Once they arrive,
though, it becomes quite clear the decontamination was never completed. And,
most of all, they discover a syringe filled with live Kellis-Amberlee.
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Joined: 2/9/2012
Posts: 427
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Thanks for sharing, Mari. I like Seanan's October Daye books, and wondered what her sci fi work was like. Now I think I'll definitely give Feed a try! I also happen to like zombies.
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She's good. Now I'm wanting to get my hands on Incrypted, too. 
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Joined: 2/9/2012
Posts: 427
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I read the first Incrypted book and I'm not as in love as I was with the October Daye ones, to be honest. The romantic elements in it are definitely stronger, and the world is a lot of fun.
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Interesting. Thanks!!
by the way - i was up until 3:30 yesterday morning finishing Feed. awesome stuff.
have moved on to the latest Joe Ledger (Extinction Machine, by Jonathan Maberry) because i've been waiting on this for months.
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Joined: 2/9/2012
Posts: 427
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Good to know . And the third book in the trilogy has been nominated for a Hugo in the Best Novel category!
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Yup. I follow Seanan's blog at LiveJournal.
Also, I have acquired all of the Newsflesh short stories except for Fed, the alternate ending for Feed.
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Whoops. I had totally forgotten about this thread!
Unfortunately, I'm not able to give the second and third books in the series the praise I gave the first. The short stories were great and did add to the overall story; with the exception of Fed, the alternate ending of Feed, they all seem to occur pre-Feed. (with the exception of San Diego 2014, which flips back and forth between 2014 and some time post-Blackout)
The second and third books had a lot (and I mean a lot) of unnecessary repetition - more in the third than the second. It got to where I wanted to shake the books to see if the repeated stuff would fall out. I mean, any responsible (?) editor would have caught this and done something about it. I would have, at least.
Here is an example. Stuff happens to character A in character A's point of view. End of chapter. Beginning of new chapter. Now we're in character B's point of view reliving the same exact scene!
Too, I had moments when I thought if I saw one more reference to how the blood testing kits worked, I might turn into a zombie myself just so I wouldn't have to go through the same explanation one more time. Also, if one more character had slapped his hand onto one of the testing screens, I'd have probably thrown the book across the room.
The core of these books, the heart, the premise was fantastic. And I enjoyed Feed. A lot.
But the execution of the second book, especially the third, left a lot to be desired. Blackout reminded me of something I might have written for myself just to satisfy the itch of needing a story to end but would have never, ever let outside the house.
I was very disappointed.
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A new Newsflesh short is scheduled for release in July, if I"m remembering right.
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launched july 15th:
http://www.amazon.com/Green-This-Land-Blue-ebook/dp/B00BL3P3T8
Publication Date:July 15, 2013
A new Newsflesh novella from the New York Times bestselling author that brought you Feed, Mira Grant.
Post-Rising
Australia can be a dangerous place, especially if you're a member of
the government-sponsored Australia Conservation Corps, a group of people
dedicated to preserving their continent's natural wealth until a cure
can be found. Between the zombie kangaroos at the fences and the zombie
elephant seals turning the penguin rookery at Prince Phillip Island into
a slaughterhouse, the work of an animal conservationist is truly never
done--and is often done at the end of a sniper rifle.
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