{"id":188,"date":"2012-01-06T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-06T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/booksyalove.com\/?p=188"},"modified":"2013-08-15T11:17:21","modified_gmt":"2013-08-15T16:17:21","slug":"unison-spark-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/?p=188","title":{"rendered":"Unison Spark, by Andy Marino (book review) – social network or mind control?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bookA perfect world made just for you,
\noptimized to provide everything that you want<\/a>,
\nmore realistic than real life.
\nWhat could go wrong<\/a> with that?<\/p>\n

Future Friday takes us to sprawling Eastern Seaboard City, where the Haves can access the ultimate social network<\/a> – Unison – and the Have-Nots are relegated to the below-street slums, with its rampant crime among the scabbed-together shacks and cast-off technology bits.<\/p>\n

Mistletoe can engineer and coax her hunk-of-junk scooter into maneuvers just beyond the maximum recommended for that old model – good thing, as gun-wielding topsider goons pursue her and lost Ambrose through Little Saigon’s alleys and hidden passageways. Why would any sensible topsider come down here?
\n
\nAll good things do have their price<\/a>, and some revolutionaries think that the price of Unison will far exceed its subscription costs. Can the teens trust the revolutionaries or UniCorp or anyone?<\/p>\n

How far is UniCorp willing to go in its search for maximum profits? Can they truly predict every individual Unison user’s ultimate needs through process-flow? When does the will of an individual become merely a consumable piece in a worldwide business plan?<\/p>\n

This page-turning potential future is available now at libraries<\/a> and bookstores<\/a> – grab it!
\n**kmm<\/p>\n

Book info<\/b>: Unison Spark \/ Andy Marino. Henry Holt, 2011. [author’s website<\/a>] [publisher site<\/a>] Review copy and cover image courtesy of the publisher.<\/p>\n

My Book Talk<\/b>: When Mistletoe saves a young topsider from uniformed non-police thugs, she wonders why this wealthy teen is in the grotty lower city. She certainly can\u2019t go up into his world of real sunshine and Unison \u2013 the social network that knows you better than you know yourself.<\/p>\n

Ah, Unison! Just shimmer in (for an appropriate fee) and enjoy limitless data flow, countless friends, your own custom-structured world for work and play. Everything is clearer, brighter, happier in Unison \u2013 as long as you keep paying your subscription. And UniCorp provides all the little things in the real world that make it less painful to be part of the \u201cfleshbound parade\u201d of humans during those so-long moments of being out of Unison.<\/p>\n

No one can predict process-flow as well as teenaged Ambrose, who is chair of UniCorp\u2019s profits division well ahead of his older brother Len. Ambrose will today move into Unison permanently, when surgery to his hypothalamus will eliminate his body\u2019s need for sleep and give him 24 hours a day in Unison to maximize profits for their father\u2019s corporation.<\/p>\n

A rogue data-transfer message as he enters the UniCorp building tells Ambrose to go down into Little Saigon now, before the surgery, or his brain and dreams will be siphoned away by\u2026 who? Len? Their father? Revolutionaries? Contrary to best process-flow data, Ambrose flees for the subcanopy\u2019s depths.<\/p>\n

As Mistletoe and Ambrose escape through Little Saigon\u2019s grimy alleys and tunnels on a puttering old roboscooter, they discover that both received the same rogue message \u201cCarpe somnium\u201d and wonder why they\u2019ve been told to \u201cseize the dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bombs in a world where explosives are illegal, closed off from the data of Unison and allies in the subcanopy, the teens must stay alive and free as they try to discover who\u2019s trying to keep Ambrose out of Unison and why the data message brought them together.<\/p>\n

Clever and suspenseful, Unison Spark is an adventure story of the future which threads questions of self and community through its action-filled pages. (One of 5,000 books recommended on www.abookandahug.com<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A perfect world made just for you, optimized to provide everything that you want, more realistic than real life. What could go wrong with that? Future Friday takes us to sprawling Eastern Seaboard City, where the Haves can access the ultimate social network – Unison – and the Have-Nots are relegated to the below-street slums, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,68,62],"tags":[90,11,45,20,5,16,118,18,40,116,43,36,49,15,21,35,33,8],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-future","category-science-fiction","tag-abandonment","tag-communication","tag-competition","tag-conflict","tag-coping","tag-determination","tag-economics","tag-family","tag-fathers","tag-gaming","tag-growing-up","tag-independence","tag-memories","tag-relationships","tag-self-image","tag-surprises","tag-survival","tag-us-author"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2537,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions\/2537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksyalove.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}