Michael Freeny

William Austin Press, £9.14, pp 371

ISBN 0 9663686 6 5

Rating:

When George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1949 the free world had just destroyed two totalitarian regimes and still faced another. The idea of Big Brother was all too real, even though the technology that Orwell described was not. Michael Freeny, an American psychologist, has written a novel somewhat like 1984, but this time the technology is all too real, and the threat comes not from a political regime but from the marketplace. The reality of modern information technology makes this book terrifying.

When we pay our bills or use our credit cards, banking machines, …