Mockingbird

Have just finished reading Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis.Was a good read, dystopian sci-fi in the style of Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World. It portrays a world where reading has been forgotten; robots run the world and humans are educated to be stupid and ignorant and purely driven by sensation; and one man learns to read and that has large consequences. It has that feeling of abstraction, of a world without real texture, only really there to serve the message he's trying to get across, a gross exaggeration of a trend he's seeing in the world that he doesn't like. It still ended up being a decent story, with the characters gradually gaining some dimension as the story progresses. Of course, the gaining of dimension was kind of the point of the story; but a bit more texture in the society portrayed would have made it more real.

A worthwhile read.