The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North

The book made me feel uneasy with the sanitized version of myself I quantify and perform for the world, and with the question of what would happen if I dropped off the net entirely. Reading this story, I found myself hyper-aware of every Tweet, Facebook post, and personal data point I created.

And once forgotten: How far would you be willing to go to be remembered? How far would you be willing to go to be forgotten? the story asks. Even as Perfection's database slowly eats up the world, we see through Hope the corrosive, grinding loneliness of living outside it. There's enormous cruelty, greed, and paranoia in this story - as well as horrible, graphic violence - but this is by far its most unnerving element.īut North doesn't let you settle comfortably into technophobia. The only consequences for Hope are in her own self-judgment. Imagine saying something dumb in a conversation (or, for that matter, robbing a bank) and walking away knowing it would be instantly forgotten. How nice it would be to disappear permanently from the grid, dissociate your profiles, ad clicks, and online rambling from anyone's memory of a real person. I found myself reading her story as an escapist fantasy, even as she recounts waking up in her childhood bedroom to discover her parents no longer have any idea who she is. That ability makes Hope the perfect foil for a world where your identity gets rendered in increasingly indelible digital ink. But the people with her in those photos and sitting across from her as she speaks remember themselves being alone. Cameras can take her picture, people can write down or record her words. Hope has a superpower that, like most interesting superpowers, is also a curse: No one who meets her can remember her.

Slipping invisibly through that creeping dystopia is North's protagonist, the globe-trotting thief Hope Arden. Added up, they lead to a kind of nirvana of the public, quantified self - even as it slowly erasing everything that defines its users as individuals. As Perfection spreads, large point counts become increasingly important status symbols. Users who follow its advice collect achievement points. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North