Michael W. Anderson (1)

Hm, I don't really know how to feel about this.

I really like the premise for this book, but for some reason it was just hard to follow for me.
Other than being a little hard to follow, I didn't have any problems with this book and I actually quite like how the society was structured.

I'm not sure if it was just me, but the story just seemed a little slow and flat; admittedly, I wasn't very engaged, but it does address a lot of the issues that are becoming more prominent today, especially with the extreme political correctness that everyone is starting to grab onto, and maybe I'll revisit this someday and see if it's different the second time around.… (más)

from Amazon: "14,014. The number of Prohibited Words had grown every year under the determined leadership of Collis Lafferty, Commissioner of the Civility Commission (CivCom). Lafferty was driven to expunge all offense from civilized society.
No one had the right to offend another.
A small group of cyber hacktivists, X, are the last remaining civil dissidents. When their leader Sid the Squid, the world’s most famous hacker and CivCom’s most vocal critic, is arrested, X is on the brink of unraveling.
The struggle to preserve freedom of opinion falls to X members Sylas the Stylus, Bucky Lastard, and NebuLes. Now they are in a race against the clock to stop Commissioner Lafferty before CivCom uncovers their true identities and prosecutes them under the Civility Code."

I found this book very disturbing considering recent events. personal pronouns are offensive, everyone is ze or zir depending on tense, instead of Miss/Mrs/Mr/Ms, everyone is Msr. Small children are encouraged by their teachers to rat out their family for using prohibited words - even like boy or girl - to the Civility Commission. You never really hear anything about the government, or if there was I missed it, so I'm not sure if the Civility Commission was running the country what. The book was pretty well written, though. Several times it did remind me of the movie Pleasantville, only with words instead of color, although in this case an offense against the Code can actually get a person tried and locked up and "rehabilitated", and if they aren't on meds before their conviction, they certainly are afterward. The lengths to which the Commission is willing to go is alarming. The story is certainly a harsh reminder of how precious or freedom of speach is, and how strongly it needs to be defended. And it reminded me of a news story recently about some goofball at a university trying to push the whole ze/zir/te/whatever the heck agenda, which just enforced the chilling nature of the trend of everyone being offended by everything.

And if anyone tries to call me ze, I'm going to smack them. And then we'll probably have an offensive little talk.… (más)

Hm, I don't really know how to feel about this.

I really like the premise for this book, but for some reason it was just hard to follow for me.
Other than being a little hard to follow, I didn't have any problems with this book and I actually quite like how the society was structured.

I'm not sure if it was just me, but the story just seemed a little slow and flat; admittedly, I wasn't very engaged, but it does address a lot of the issues that are becoming more prominent today, especially with the extreme political correctness that everyone is starting to grab onto, and maybe I'll revisit this someday and see if it's different the second time around.… (más)