World-Mart [Kindle Edition]

World-Mart depicts a very possible future reality - class segregation, failing energy supplies, food shortages, global warming, anti-biotic resistant viruses and governmental control over every action and choice made in life. Your background, upbringing and ability to follow without questioning dictate whether you thrive or simply survive in the world.

This is a thought-provoking and quite frightening book. I particularly found the idea of euthanasia of the ill and voluntary euthanasia for people who have found themselves, for whatever reason, demoted through the class ranks to be very disturbing and a reflection of the importance we place on bettering or at least maintaining our own statuses in life.

World-Mart also contains some wonderful poetry written by one of the main characters, Shelley, which I found particularly moving.

My only negative with this book was that some scenes played out way too quickly and could have been fleshed-out a little further, particularly to give a little more life to some of the characters. However this does not mean that the characters were flat or one-dimensional, simply that I wished I had gotten a chance to know them better, and particularly to know how the world came to be that of World-Mart.

I am not a fan of science fiction so reading World-Mart was an adventure for me. The story is set in the future but not far enough away to be unbelievable. The globe is in crisis as drug resistant disease has decimated the population and the climate has gone haywire. The government and business leaders have taken control of society for the sake of mankind's future. A cast society is divided into an elite and a working class, all governed by a corporate board, who make decisions for the whole. Beneath them a population of mutants strive to survive by attacking the corporation and are deemed as intellectually subnormal, criminals. The backdrop is very real and very believable, especially when one thinks about the Tsunamis and bird flu outbreaks in the last few years.

The characters in the book are torn between towing the party line and trying to build a brighter future for their children. The plot trots along at a good pace and there is action, violence and murder weaved into their dark world as the terrorist deviants struggle to break the corporate stranglehold. It is a good thriller with a personal struggle running through it. The ending leaves plenty of room for scope. I think there may be more World-Mart novels coming. If they do, I will definitely read them. A great read, if you like thrillers.

Some time in the not too distant future the corporate world and government have become one and the same, antibiotic resistant diseases have wiped out many and global warming has wreaked havoc on the world we know. Society has been divided into the Corp elite and Mart underclass, ruled by the secretive Corporate. The lowest of the low are deviants, widely held to be inferior criminal types.

George and Virginia, who have some memories of life as it is now, are fortunate to be part of the Corp, and in a way their American dream is still alive in so far as they hope that by spending most of their income on their children's education they might be able to obtain middle management jobs and improve their lot in life. However that dream is shattered when Virginia is hospitalised as a result of a terrorist attack. As a result they both have their eyes opened to a few things Corporate would rather the masses didn't know.

World Mart paints a bleak but all too plausible picture of a future where the climate is even more out of kilter than it is at present, where the failure of the present to deal with landfill and pollution has resulted in all sorts of problems and rationing, and where monopolistic corporations have gained a stranglehold on the world. As the book unfolded seeing George, and Virginia in particular, realise that they are being manipulated and controlled by the elite ruling class was a ray of hope. By contrast teen daughter Shelley, reeling from tragedy, despite seeing herself as rebelling chooses to believe the party line. I found the parents' actions and feelings understandable, but found their daughter a bit inconsistent.... She vacillated between wanting to make a stand and be a rebel, and being terrified by the outcome of her actions, but it seemed a sudden about face and she came over as more than just a confused teenager, I wanted to give her a slap at times.

There are incidents of violence and murder but the delivery of these events is matter of fact and the way the story moves quickly on makes it seem unexceptional, which I found a bit disturbing. Perhaps this is what the author intended in this dystopian future, but I'm not entirely convinced.

I found the backdrop a scary possibility and liked the plot but found some of the elements didn't sit quite right for me. I also felt that the carefully constructed hierarchys that were set up in the first part of the book became almost redundant later on as it became much more of a personal tale, with the issues between the Corporate and the terrorists pushed to one side.

It was a reasonably good read but the characters weren't quite compelling enough to draw me back to it in the way some books do. Read more ›

On the whole this is a pretty well written piece, the world is a believable place.

The trouble is you can tell the writer is either young or unfamiliar with scifi in general as the idea of corporate society isn't a new one, it was best covered in the movie Rollerball (based on the short story The Rollerball Murders by Norman Jewison).

The idea that one is born into a place in society has been done in things like 1984 (and Brazil).

The various classes of life are completely believable as are the drones who do their jobs without thought or question.

The main characters aren't very well rounded and have no empathy or emotional depth. I found it very hard to invest in them.

Death in this book seems like an afterthought, even when its someone fairly important to the storyline the death is quick then brushed under the carpet.

There is no real ending as such, the book moves towards some sort of action by the deviants that either takes place then is ignored or is about to take place then the book suddenly ends without addressing the issue. Its a very odd way of finishing unless I missed something when I read it.

The really unforgivable thing about this work is it hasn't been spellchecked or proofed fully. I found several silly spelling mistakes and a section where a sentence doesn't make sense because several words are transposed.

If these were fixed and the ending was more definitive then this would be a decent little read.

It certainly occupied me for a few days and I think it would make a good tv sf short show.