Broadcast

Charlie Brooker has pretty much cornered the market in technofear Twilight Zone parables, so if you’re going to dabble in similar themes, you need to be sure you’ve got something new to say. Sadly, with his novel Broadcast, Liam Brown hasn’t.

Brown is clearly an author with talent: his prose is compelling, his pacing is page-turning, and his characters are lively. But this tale of a vlogger who becomes the star of a new form of web-based reality TV feels like a lot of ideas we’ve seen or read before. Many times.

Broadcast’s protagonist, David Callow, has a chip inserted in his head which means that viewers of “MindCast” can see his thoughts. But the company that pioneers the project may be putting profits before pioneering, and so when Callow tries to back out, he finds that he may have inadvertently signed away his soul.

Aside from the overriding overfamiliarity, the book also suffers from the fact that MindCast sounds so dull to watch that you wonder why audiences would even flock to it in the first place. There’s also a sudden shift into another overused zeitgeisty genre in the final act that has a whiff of “this needs a twist ending!”

But, the book is exciting, as well as fun and readably short. Just think of it is as coffee-onthe-go sci-fi and it’s decent enough. Dave Golder