Lovestar

Lovestar
By Andri Snær Magnason (translated by Victoria Cribb)

LoveStar is one of those disarmingly playful SF books — comparisons have been made to Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams — that nevertheless ask important questions about where we’re heading. In the future virtually every aspect of human life is mediated by a ubiquitous Icelandic corporation, headed by an obsessive genius who has branded himself LoveStar. Love, death, and even God have become clickable commodities, or apps running on our fully networked minds.

All of this provides rich ground for satire, like the way people’s bodies can be hijacked into screaming advertisements for various products. But LoveStar is also a novel of ideas, and about how ideas, especially when pushed down a slope that’s slippery with invasive technologies, can change the world in unanticipated and disturbing ways.