A blast from the past, by Howard Rheingold

The Savage Report: 1994 by Howard Rheingold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book and its sequel (The War Of The Gurus) are genuine guilty pleasures. If 1974 (the year the book came out) had kept going for another twenty years then 1994 could well have been like what Rheingold describes here. His heroes are investigative reporters for a TV broadcast followed by billions of people and which has the power to topple governments. (It is actually called a "holocast" because it is a 3D broadcast). The main hero is more like James Bond than what we would think of as an investigative reporter today. In his world uncovering the truth could get you killed, but he's ready and able to shoot back.

This book is not great art, but it does have an interesting vision of what we thought the future might be like. We don't have Jack Anderson and The Savage Report today. All we have are Fox News, bloggers, and The Daily Show.

I am pretty certain that if there had been more than two books in this series I would have bought them.



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