Welcome to The Cover Contessa's tour stop for Angie Smibert's
The Meme Plague
Have you read the books in this series?
It begins with the name JONAS W. on the side of a cardboard coffin—right before the funeral procession blows up. Then it’s the whisper in the back of Micah’s head: Your father betrayed his country. You can’t always trust your own brain. Not when you have one of the mayor’s mandatory chips in your skull. Micah knows that the chip developed by TFC (the corporation that runs the Therapeutic Forgetting Clinics) does more than just erase unpleasant memories—it implants new ones. The MemeCast warns citizens to “fight the hack.”
Micah and his friends have each lost something—a parent, a relationship, a home, maybe even their own identities as they remembered them to be. But together, they can make sure some things are never forgotten.
Election Day is coming, and Mayor Mignon is set to be elected to Congress. It’s time to build a new electronic frontier, one that’s not controlled by the mayor and his cronies. It’s time to get out the vote and shake up the system. It’s time to finally say enough.
Release date: 8/13/2013
Publisher: Skyscape/Amazon
Genre: YA science fiction
ISBN: 978-1477816608
ASIN: B00CEHQ484
Today, Angie has honored us with a guest post.
So let's hear what she has to say about the role of technology and it's role in her book(s):
The Subversive Role of Technology
In the Memento Nora series, technology is all about control. The information flow in Nora and Micah’s near-future world is tightly monitored and controlled in the name of convenience and security. And the Therapeutic Forgetting Clinics (TFCs) can even manipulate the information in your brain by erasing memories (voluntarily or not) and by adding new ones. The powers-that-be use technology (and science) to keep the consumer-citizens distracted, misinformed, and spending money.
But Micah, Nora, Winter, Velvet, and Aiden—as well as much of the underground movement in the series—use technology to subvert that control and put it back into their own hands. They need to go a little old school, in some respects, to get around the security grid. So they print underground comics. They start a pirate radio show. They build their own internet. They hack. They make. They barter. They grow.
The heroes also embrace this DIY ethic to express themselves--which is a subversive act, too. Winter builds kinetic sculptures out of junk. Velvet and the boys write music. Lina makes her own electronics, including wearable ones. Micah even helped build Black Dog Village. Certainly the kids (except possibly Nora) enjoy creating these things, but they’ve really become makers to claim their own lives.
BTW, underground comics, radio, and even networks have been (and still are) used IRL. For instance, during the Arab Spring, governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa tried cutting off internet access in their countries to control the uprisings. However, the people built their own ad hoc wireless networks out of not much more than old routers, tin cans, and two-by-fours. (For more info on this, see the MemeNet page on the Memento Nora series website. I’ve also got info on building maker spaces and about other inspirations for the technology, places, and science in the series. )
Thanks so much for stopping by today, Angie! So great having you here with us today!
Angie Smibert was born in Blacksburg, a once sleepy college town in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. She grew up thinking she wanted to be a veterinarian; organic chemistry had other ideas. But she always had stories in her head. Eventually, after a few degrees and a few cool jobs—including a 10-year stint at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center—she wrote some of those stories down.
She’s published many short stories, for both adults and teens. (You can read some of them on her website.)
Social Media Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@amsmibert
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