Sunday Salon: The Unbinding

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Currently reading: Walter Kirn, The Unbinding

Pages read: 19 | total for day: 41
Time spent reading: 21 minutes | total for day: 47 minutes

Comments: This book had an interesting genesis. Kirn wrote it as a serial novel for Slate.com, in real time. Well, maybe that's not the right way of putting it: he was writing it as it was being posted on the site; it wasn't a finished product that was then published in serial form. In its online form, it had hyperlinks. These aren't reproduced here, but the text that was linked in its virtual incarnation is bold here, and one can go to an associated web site to look at the links if one choose. I have not done so.

Very interesting book so far. The lead character is a certain Kent Selkirk, a single guy who works for a company called AidSat. AidSat is a sort of über-OnStar system: people who subscribe to the service wear a bracelet or some such instrument that connects them with the system. AidSat can help out in all sorts of circumstances--from offering advice on buying furniture or cars to sending an ambulance in the event of emergency; and AidSat monitors the subscriber's vital signs in case of trouble. It's a really appealing premise. Here's Kent describing it:

"Such moments are what I live for in my job. They're why I get to work early for every shift and volunteer to fill in during the holidays: those times when I and the AidSat system unite--when the broad continental reach of our concern fixes on a single soul in peril and we stretch our arms down from the stars. Our infinite automated tenderness ought to have been built into the universe, and for a few years, as a child, I thought it had been."

Who wouldn't want this? It calls to mind, actually, Ian Hocking's super-computer Ego which--heads up--I want as soon as it's built.

Tags: The Sunday Salon

Comments

[Susan]

1.

Kent Selkirk sounds like an old-fashioned employee. You don't get committed staff like that in this day and age. Perhaps the company is farming out the jobs to a monastery or some such.

[Debra Hamel]

2.

I'm beginning to think he's a complicated fellow.

I, however, would say that I am of such a sort.

[Susan]

3.

You are, of course, but you're not in the workplace.

[Debra Hamel]

4.

Well, to an extent I am.

[Clare D]

5.

I dunno, I think I'd find being permanently hooked up to even such a compassionate system fairly suffocating and creepy. Sounds a really interesting premise, though - a kind of updated 1984.

[Debra Hamel]

6.

Well, I suspect this won't end well. I read more last night, and it's not at all clear yet what's going on in this book.