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A review by adamrbrooks
Point B by Drew Magary
4.0
Reviews focusing on "here's what the content creator SHOULD" have done are lame. And yet...
This is an entertaining story. Like Magary's "The Immortal," it imagines a future where technology changes everything, for good and for ill, and spins out the consequences for us all. Cheap teleportation allowing anyone to go everywhere really would ruin everywhere good. And his cultural criticism is still relevant (When protagonist says she hates a violent law enforcement agency, someone else says: "It ain't about you. The point is America.")
But the evil-doers are just so cartoonish that it made it hard to appreciate the good in the book. One is a pure masochist who tortures people just for fun. That's rare in real life. The force that causes more harm (and the style of harm the book focuses on) is more likely to be amorality, or merely putting profits over people. It's a bit less dramatic, but I know from Magary's political writing it's the sort of thing he understands.
For me, it would have made the book better to explore those ideas.
This is an entertaining story. Like Magary's "The Immortal," it imagines a future where technology changes everything, for good and for ill, and spins out the consequences for us all. Cheap teleportation allowing anyone to go everywhere really would ruin everywhere good. And his cultural criticism is still relevant (When protagonist says she hates a violent law enforcement agency, someone else says: "It ain't about you. The point is America.")
But the evil-doers are just so cartoonish that it made it hard to appreciate the good in the book. One is a pure masochist who tortures people just for fun. That's rare in real life. The force that causes more harm (and the style of harm the book focuses on) is more likely to be amorality, or merely putting profits over people. It's a bit less dramatic, but I know from Magary's political writing it's the sort of thing he understands.
For me, it would have made the book better to explore those ideas.