The Affinities

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Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / Science Fiction / General / Wilson, Robert Charles
On Shelf At: Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Science Fiction / General / Wilson, Robert Charles	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"A Tom Doherty Associates book."
After becoming a part of the Tau, one of twenty-two large global network Affinities in the near future, young Adam Fisk thinks his life has improved for the better until the different Affinities begin to go to war with one another -- in a conflict that will change Adam's world forever.

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Drab writing but terrific ideas. submitted by eknapp on August 21, 2015, 8:40am A SOCIAL-science fiction novel. A new subgenre, perhaps?

In the near future, a company develops a method (personality testing, brain mapping, and complex algorithm) for grouping people behaviorally and socially into "Affinities". It's a little like a dating service but an Affinity is comprised of people that trust each other naturally and cooperate extremely effectively. The Affinities tells the story of the creation, heyday, and collapse of the Affinities through the eyes of one early joiner.

It's a fascinating concept, the idea that all this social power is out there just waiting to be tapped. But Wilson goes a step further by addressing the implications of such a phenomenon, things that might logically follow from the rise of powerful, hyper-collaborative yet naturally exclusionary social units. Affinity-oriented financial institutions. Successful, landless virtual-states, as family and national loyalty is trumped by Affinity loyalty. Inter-Affinity warfare. I love this stuff.

It doesn't have a happy ending, exactly, and yet there's an air of optimism about the future. Wilson doesn't provide answers to global warming, overpopulation, poverty, or any of the other great world problems. But he offers kind of a blurry outline of what a solution might look like. It's neat.

Bland writing and a certain ineptitude for action scenes kept this from being a 5 star read for me. But I'm glad I read it.