One of the special pleasures of the Harry Potter stories is their send-up of modern consumer culture--from Bertie Botts' Every Flavour Beans (and they do mean every flavor) to Chocolate Frogs, which come complete with a collectible card featuring a celebrity witch or wizard. Potter's creator, J.K. Rowling, pokes fun at contemporary marketing and advertising with tongue-in-cheek warmth that manages to make her simultaneously attractive to Madison Avenue and the rest of us--a remarkable achievement. Max Barry's Jennifer Government, the satirical successor to his well-received first novel Syrup, takes a different angle on the consumer-marketing-gone-mad theme.
Index Terms:
science fiction, consumer
Citation:
Marc Donner, "Jennifer Government," IEEE Security and Privacy, vol. 2, no. 5, pp. 57-59, Sept. 2004, doi:10.1109/MSP.2004.74