Where It All Goes Down
Near-Future America
Welcome to the World of Tomorrow
Feed takes place in an America of the near future, maybe 100 or so years after our present day. Sure, this world has its good points, like science and technology so advanced that you can have your favorite electronic devices and social networks installed directly into your head. Would you like to go for a weekend trip to the moon? No problem—you'll enjoy yourself at The Ricochet Lounge, a fun low-gravity hangout. Plus, you can have your own "upcar," which is basically a super-advanced car that flies.
But before you pull out your Delorean to head back to the future, maybe you'll want to know some of the downsides. Like, most of the natural world has been destroyed. The forests are all gone, and the ocean is basically a toxic oil slick. People can't conceive naturally but have to go to a conceptionarium to genetically engineer a rugrat. Oh, and everyone's getting these meg gross lesions and their skin is falling off. The closest anyone gets to nature is suburban housing developments with names like "Apple Crest" and "Fox Hollow" (18.7).
Powerful corporations control the schools, which teach solid critical-thinking skills like how to decorate your room. At dinner time, your steak will come from a meat farm, where rows and rows of genetically-engineered meat glisten in the sun. Just watch out for the occasional horn or eye, when the genetic programming goes disgustingly wrong.
The More Things Change...
In Titus's world (similar to our own), America is the major player on the world stage, and American corporations take full advantage of dirt-cheap labor across the globe. The United States has also recently annexed the moon as part of its territory, which other countries think is just way uncool. In fact, The Global Alliance (sort of like our modern-day UN, but tougher) is so not okay with this and other recent American actions (like destroying several small villages in South America with toxic waste) that they're threatening to blast them into next week. Basically, Titus's world is the-same-but-different, like our world taken to a satirical extreme.
So, why does Anderson set his story in a world that could almost be ours—or that might end up being ours, in a century or so?
Setting his dystopia in a time that takes place just around the corner from our own allows him to turn up the volume on trends that already exist in our world. It's recognizable, but just extreme enough to be strange.
And the scariest thing of all? Anderson wrote Feed in 2002. Look around you now: his vision of the future doesn't seem so extreme anymore, does it?