Dystopian Literature, Satire and Parody, Science Fiction
Dystopian Literature
If you've read seen or read The Hunger Games, you know the drill. Dystopian literature is all about portraying a fictional society—usually futuristic, but not always—where things have gone very, very wrong. In Feed, we see how corporate power and a public desperate to have all the newest and shiniest gadgets have really made a mess of things. Now, the environment's ruined to the point where whales have to wear a special plastic coating just to be able to survive the ocean, and people are getting horrible lesions all over their bodies because of pollution.
But that's totes cool, people, because the Feed equivalents of Nicholas Hoult and Chloe Grace Moretz are showing off their weeping sores, and School™ has managed to destroy any semblance of critical thinking skills.
Here's the thing: the best of dystopian lit basically takes the current society's state of affairs and turns the volume up (and we're talking way, way up) to provide a critique or warning about our own world. And that's exactly what M.T. Anderson is doing here. He's showing how without a good dose of balance and sanity, today's obsessive immersion in the Internet and consumer culture could become tomorrow's SchoolTM, hazmat-suited whales, and "everything must go" nightmare.
Satire and Parody
Anderson is also all about serving us an intense ten-course, all-you-can-eat satire banquet (to use Feed's language). Satire is all about being over-the-top and using hyperbole to poke fun at people's bad behavior and shortcomings, offering larger critique on society.
So, when we see Calista, Quendy,
and Loga run to the bathroom several times to change their hairstyles because
they hear on the feed that theirs are just about five minutes out of fashion,
that's satire. The author is poking fun at both the girls for their ridiculous
behavior, but he's also giving us some more important food for thought (there's
that banquet imagery again) about a culture in which consumer behavior is the
primary way people create their identities.
Satire is also usually a highly ironic genre. One memorable example is when Violet and Titus's dad argue over the relative merits of having trees versus having air factories. Titus's dad supports modern technology and advancement, so he's totally cool with the forests being cut down to make room for air factories, while Violet points out that, um, trees themselves are air factories.
Anderson is using this, and other ironic situations like it, to comment on how short-sighted (and sometimes downright dumb) this near-future American society has become—and to warn us that we might just be headed in that direction.
Science Fiction
You've seen Star Wars, right? So you know that sci-fi shows us fictional worlds full of advanced scientific or technological discoveries. We're talking every social networking site you can imagine, combined with every smartphone app that's out there, with your iPod and cell phone rolled into one and implanted directly into your head. We're talking flying cars. We're talking being able to travel to the moons of Jupiter and going off for a weekend jaunt on the moon.
In a word, we're talking Feed. Its futuristic society filled with scientific and technological advances puts it right up there with some of the best science fiction. And, like the best science fiction, it's really telling us something about our own world.