To Kill the Truth
Sam Bourne
Having read it
★★★★☆
Pretty good read. Started a bit randomly, but I think that was deliberate to help show the essence of the story. Once I got into it and the plot started to develop it was intriguing to find out what might happen next. A good central character in Maggie Costello. She helped keep the reader’s attention in her discoveries and helped propel the story.
A good passage
People no longer bothered remembering facts, because they knew they could just look them up. This company’s product had become nothing less than an outsourced part of the human brain.
A second good passage
If ever there was a slamdunk candidate for prosecution under truth in advertising laws, ‘retirement homes’ were surely it. The names alone were almost always a lie. ‘Sunny Side’ would turn out to be a battery cage for the elderly, permanently shrouded in cloud. ‘Sea View’ would be a barracks, housing the aged in a penitentiary whose only glimpse of the ocean would come from the twenty-four/seven TV sets permanently tuned to the Weather Channel. And though they would always claim to be a ‘community’, too often they consisted of individuals seeing out their last days in atomised solitude.
A third good passage
Jason Ramey had read about champion cyclists and how they taught their bodies to delay exhaustion. They would collapse in a heap one day, they told themselves; but it couldn’t happen just yet. They became masters of delayed gratification and, for the purposes of the task in hand, basic human rest was deemed to be gratification. Sleep would be indulged eventually. But that day had not yet come.