Amped

AADL has no copies of this item

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Excerpt
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

It's dumb, but at least it's quick. submitted by eknapp on December 21, 2012, 11:02pm "Amped" is a near-future techno-discrimination story. Like Gattaca in reverse: it's the 'improved' people in this case who are the discriminatees. An 'amp' is a person who has a chip installed on the surface of his brain; it can prevent seizures, fix fetal alcohol syndrome, raise IQ, and--for a few key characters--turn you into a combat god. An amp is recognizable by a small maintenance port in the temple.

When "Amped" begins, the Supreme Court has just ruled discrimination against amps to be legal, and things go downhill fast. A charismatic senator leads the fight to strip amps of human rights; amp extremists launch terrorist attacks; innocent amps are forced to live in "safety camps".

It reads like a much less sophisticated version of Nancy Kress's "Beggars in Spain", which was a brilliant exploration of the causes and effects of prejudice and fear. The plot turns in "Amped" are all right out of English 101. It has no sense of history, a glaring lack. There were no references at all to civil rights landmarks or historical events. SOMEONE should have made the connection between the amp safety camps and the internment of Japanese American citizens in WWII, for example. The absence of historical awareness was strikingly off-putting.

The story is unsophisticated, but at least it has the good grace to be quick. The breakneck pace helped make "Amped" tolerable.