FOREWORD CLARION
https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/grid-city-overload/
Five stars (out of five)
Information overload. Living in 2012, we
know what that’s like: smartphones, Facebook, news feeds, YouTube, and
Twitter all constantly compete for our attention. As overwhelming as
today’s technology-fueled society can be, Steven T. Bramble’s Grid City Overload
imagines a not-too-distant future where high-tech connections
completely dominate our lives. Welcome to Grid, CO. It’s 2025, a
time when subway advertisements adjust to a viewer’s gaze and LCD
ceiling tiles announce the news of the world in an endless stream.
Drawing on ideas set out by journalist Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock, Bramble shows that the problem of “too much change in too short a period of time” has only accelerated since Toffler first described shell-shocked human beings trying to cope with rapid change. In Bramble’s vision, people have come to depend upon technology to such an extent that they are no longer able to connect on a human level. Everyone is hooked up to their machines, but can’t access each other. Indeed, each member of Bramble’s revolving cast of narrators lives alone.
Bramble lets his characters tell the story, which is equal parts fast-paced mystery and thoughtful, existential reflection. There’s Gerney, an ambivalent, distracted drug addict; Fish, a factory worker who has a text-only relationship with his girlfriend; and Amy, cold-hearted hacker extraordinaire. Add another half-dozen voices to the mix, including a sentient cell phone named Camillia, and you might expect this story, at over four hundred pages in length, to get confusing.
Bramble gives each character such a distinct perspective that it takes no time at all to adjust to each in turn. Similarly, the long, stream-of-consciousness sentences the author employs throughout could easily get convoluted and tiring. But while he piles image upon image in a clever reflection of the Grid city culture, the narrative continually offers a new perspective, a gem of a thought worth capturing.
Why was the city of Grid created, and why do people continue to live there? This is the bigger mystery that overshadows subplots of corporate espionage and attempted assassinations. Bramble makes it clear that escape is possible—the rest of the country is still out there, albeit not in great shape. He makes effective use of metaphor to compare the human experience in Grid to that of a beetle trapped between two panes of glass: “The space is narrow, the beetle navigating it vertically … crawling up and down in pathetically aimless directions in a definite frenzy, his little legs and antennae working overtime with fear. He stops, moves his head side to side like a dog sniffing out a trail before exploding off in yet another doomed direction.”
Grid City Overload is in many ways the Bright Lights, Big City of the current generation. Where Jay McInerney’s 1984 novel featured cocaine addicts looking for their next big thrill and coming up empty, Bramble’s story focuses on an entire society “oversaturated with stimuli” and trying to glean some meaning from it all.
Drawing on ideas set out by journalist Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock, Bramble shows that the problem of “too much change in too short a period of time” has only accelerated since Toffler first described shell-shocked human beings trying to cope with rapid change. In Bramble’s vision, people have come to depend upon technology to such an extent that they are no longer able to connect on a human level. Everyone is hooked up to their machines, but can’t access each other. Indeed, each member of Bramble’s revolving cast of narrators lives alone.
Bramble lets his characters tell the story, which is equal parts fast-paced mystery and thoughtful, existential reflection. There’s Gerney, an ambivalent, distracted drug addict; Fish, a factory worker who has a text-only relationship with his girlfriend; and Amy, cold-hearted hacker extraordinaire. Add another half-dozen voices to the mix, including a sentient cell phone named Camillia, and you might expect this story, at over four hundred pages in length, to get confusing.
Bramble gives each character such a distinct perspective that it takes no time at all to adjust to each in turn. Similarly, the long, stream-of-consciousness sentences the author employs throughout could easily get convoluted and tiring. But while he piles image upon image in a clever reflection of the Grid city culture, the narrative continually offers a new perspective, a gem of a thought worth capturing.
Why was the city of Grid created, and why do people continue to live there? This is the bigger mystery that overshadows subplots of corporate espionage and attempted assassinations. Bramble makes it clear that escape is possible—the rest of the country is still out there, albeit not in great shape. He makes effective use of metaphor to compare the human experience in Grid to that of a beetle trapped between two panes of glass: “The space is narrow, the beetle navigating it vertically … crawling up and down in pathetically aimless directions in a definite frenzy, his little legs and antennae working overtime with fear. He stops, moves his head side to side like a dog sniffing out a trail before exploding off in yet another doomed direction.”
Grid City Overload is in many ways the Bright Lights, Big City of the current generation. Where Jay McInerney’s 1984 novel featured cocaine addicts looking for their next big thrill and coming up empty, Bramble’s story focuses on an entire society “oversaturated with stimuli” and trying to glean some meaning from it all.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/steven-t-bramble/grid-city/
A story of near-future distress from author Bramble (Affliction Included, 2009).
The futuristic town of Grid, Colo., is every bit as cold and melancholy as the name would imply. Full of neon corporate logos, industrial pollution and an unvaryingly unhappy population, Grid encompasses all that people who fret about the future of American cities are worried about. Within this maze of despair are a handful of characters that range from a drug-addicted used car salesman who will latch on to anyone resembling a father figure to a stunningly sexy, evil computer expert who will latch on to anyone she can control. In alternating narratives, the novel plumbs the lives of these characters as they lose themselves in drugs and technological advances in an effort to block out all the noise around them and find out who they really are. This proves easier said than done. The people of Grid (and presumably much of the world’s population circa 2025) are not just more interested in looking at their electronic devices than the real world, at times the gadgets assume a life of their own. In the book’s most inventive section, one particularly lonely and paranoid character manages to carry on a love affair with a cellphone. Other sections prove far less inventive as again and again, people who were born human become altered due to the constant barrage of devices and “sensory overflow.” The average reader is likely to recognize a world where even upscale, busy waiters feel the need to check their phones continually. Whether they get their highs from drugs or political corruption, there are not many characters to root for in Grid, so the reader is left largely indifferent to their fates. Though spiced up with Pynchon-esque flourishes, these tangents add only to the already-obvious message of people drowning in technology.
A creative and repetitive analysis of our collective infatuation with glowing screens.
