Impossible not to laugh at the audacity of the world. At their willingness to forget almost everything and come back to the same.
More Perfect
by Temi Oh
Genre: Sci-Fi
About: It's the year 2050 and a new technology allows the human mind to be more like a computer than ever. Memories will never fade. Dreams can be built. Crime can be foreseen. It's a more perfect world, and a more perfect you. But not everyone wants to be part of the future, or part of the destiny that will destroy it.
Thoughts
This is a really immersive book. The world-building is stunning and Moremi and Orpheus are such flawed and compelling main characters. I went into this expecting a dystopian world where we're fighting to overcome the system, and found it to be a far more complex and interesting story. The world is dystopian, but it's also believable and though Moremi and Orpheus have reasons to hate the technology, they feel more ordinary than rebellious. They have moments where they don't fit in the world, and moments when they conform completely. It's a multi-layered story that doesn't really have heroes or villains. It does, however, have fear and uncertainty, love and betrayal, family and abandonment. The divide between the Pulsed and Pulseless is given in such uncomfortable ways. You simultaneously side with both and neither. You wonder at the future.
I really enjoyed the writing and the atmosphere of this novel overall. It's a long journey but it has so many elements to the story. There's a sense of mythology to the character journeys, a strange mix of technology and prophecy that I just loved.
However, there were perhaps too many dystopian elements. Recoding dreams to erase trauma, arresting people for future crimes, addiction to the dreamworld, acts of terrorism, forced surveillance and memory reading, immortality through shared consciousness... Any one of these issues could have been the focus of the entire book, but Temi Oh explores all of them. The ideas are reminiscent of popular sci-fi books and movies such as Inception, Minority Report, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Founders Trilogy etc. to name just a few. And while this novel is absolutely original and very much stands as its own unique story, I think it would have landed more powerfully to me if it had limited its focus, as those popular movies and books do.
Overall, I'm so glad to have read a Temi Oh book. Do You Dream of Terra-Two has been on my TBR forever and I'm definitely going to read it now that I've read this one.
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