I am seriously late to this fine and disturbing book, published in 2005, just when I was writing under deadline and not reading anything new.
I haven't seen the film, but I'd heard enough to have some idea of what the book was about. It was the Audible edition that I listened to (an excellent narrator) and I can highly recommend it.
Dystopian fiction at its best. Like the scenario I envisioned a few days ago with Universal Auto-Correct, the premise in both cases is bizarre and far-fetched, but the idea at the core invites the reader to look around them for similar situations.
I can't say it better than these paragraphs from a review in The Guardian (full review HERE):
"Perhaps the most sinister aspect of the novel is the way it reflects ourselves back at us. In this world, the cost of a world free from cancer and diseases is, in human terms, catastrophic, but, as one character asks, how can we go back to a world where these diseases cause so much suffering and indignity? In the same way, our trade off for the luxury of development and the necessity of ending poverty seems to be locking us into a cycle of dependency on fossil fuels. Let alone the thought of where our cheap clothes, technology – and the raw materials which build them – come from. I’ve never quite encountered such a well-written fictional account of cognitive bias – the way we modify our beliefs or our behavior to avert the guilt or discomfort at holding two self-contradictory beliefs in our mind at once – at society’s level. This alone makes this a precious book indeed. The spike in anti-migrant and anti-Muslim hate crime in a post-Brexit Britain, not to mention the rise of Donald Trump in the US or the far right in Europe, has been a salutary reminder of the need to always avoid ‘othering’ human beings; this book is full of such compassion for humanity it must surely be a worthy antidote. The idea of letting the technological or medical genie out of the bottle without considering the full moral, social and environmental implications is as relevant and haunting today as it has ever been."