Steven Amsterdam, Tim Richards, Humanity
Things we didn't see coming is in the form of nine adjoined episodes which follow the life of an unnamed protagonist. Amsterdam, the author of this book, also holds other works like Cakewalk, What we know now and Best Medicine to his name. He possesses an acute sense for threats to
humanity including pandemics, Y2K, climate change and war. These and other topics form the theme for some of his works. In Things we didn't see, Amsterdam is more interested in people's reaction in uncertain doom than the technology itself. The character list is as follows.
We begin with the protagonist, a male narrator who is unnamed throughout the story. He is around ten years old at the beginning of the book and in his forties when it ends. He is a relatively moral character who does whatever is in his power to help those around him. His father, Otis serves as the prophet in the novel. He predicts the oncoming apocalypse and tries to save his family.
[...] The book begins with the narrator's father, convinced of an impending doom, drives his family out of the city to live in the woods. After Y2K, the supposed crisis, passes, the young narrator moves with his mother to the city. At age seventeen, together with his grandparents, they leave the city and at some point the grandparents die. At this point, a barricade gets constructed between the city and the countryside and the necessities of life get rationed. In the third scene, the narrator works for the government to evacuate the flood lands. [...]
[...] In his early 20s, he meets Margo in the city, and they later move to live in the desert. Just as he enters his 30s, he separates from Margo only to be re-united in a refugee camp where he works as a verification officer. In his early 30s, Juliet separates the two lovebirds causing the protagonist to leave his lover for good. He moves to a remote community where he gets assigned the role of guarding Jeph but later leaves him to fend for himself. [...]
[...] Technology in Things We Don't See Comingis also not as secretive as that in Dog's Life. It is also not controlled by a selective few like in the latter rather everyone in Things We Didn'tSee Coming is involved in the abuse of technology which leads to consequences like climate change. The situation is different in Dog's Life where the management of Axcel International decides to misuse technology and make the lives of those involved a living hell. Technology is negative The obvious depiction in both works is the negativity of technology. [...]
[...] In spite of plenty of rewards from Axcel in the form of lavish houses and a lot of money, they confessed that what they subjected their children to would forever haunt them. Works Cited & Bibliography Richards, Tim. Dog's life. Collingwood, Vic: Black Inc Print. Amsterdam, Steven K. Things We Didn't See Coming. New York: Pantheon Books Internet resource. [...]
[...] Astrid is, however, suspicious that they do not tell him the truth or somehow, hide some of it. He also questions some of Axcel International's former workers, most notably, Michele. Michele claims to have worked for Axcel for ten years and four months as a lead scientist. She says that she left the place as she could not handle the secrecy. She also alleges that all the other interviewees had been faking on Axcel's real work on the boys. According to her, Axcel's real experiments involved the complete opposite of age acceleration; age elongation. [...]
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