Jennifer Government
I finished Jennifer Government this afternoon, and it was absolutely outstanding. The review snippet on the cover — "It's Catch-22 by way of the The Matrix" — was apt. Jennifer Government's future dystopia is an uncomfortably logical extension of today's world, but its socio-political message manifests, as it should, through quality, character-driven narrative rather than omniscient editorializing.
The other thing I really liked about Jennifer Government was its economy, both sentence-by-sentence and as a whole. Too many novelists are too in love with their prose; not so with Max Barry, apparently.
Unfortunately, I am now obsessed with forcing someone to let me write the screenplay adaptation. This is only a problem because I'm pretty sure a film version would be legally impossible due to the subject matter.
Sidebar: In Jennifer Government's future world people no longer have last names. Instead, they take the last name of the company they work for. The titular character works for the government; other characters include John Nike, Nathanial ExxonMobil, Billy NRA, and so forth. In the comments, please post both your worst and best future names, based on the organizations for which you've worked. My best is toss-up between Jeff Atlas (powerful!) and Jeff Decipher (mysterious...). The worst, certainly, is Jeff Apache 6.
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