Read this in 1987 when i was 11 - possibly not quite the targeted age category. The older i've got the more chilling the story has become. ( )

When I first read this book in grade school it left an indelible mark, such that it still stuck with me more than a decade later despite forgetting the title and author and most of the plot. Finally rediscovering and rereading it has only given me a greater appreciation. The decent imagery and even nuance that characterize the writing and plot was largely lost on my ten year old self. For example, I had remembered the ending as a total downer, a defeat. Recognizing it as the assumption of adult responsibility this time around was pretty peak. ( )

I enjoyed this book a lot. It is a dystopian young adult novel, that jumps around a future England. So we see the Est schools, where children are groomed for a life of country estates and wood lined studies and port, and the Tech colleges, where anti-social geniuses get on with making things work, and the inner city ghettos of the Unnems, where everything is games and fame and a short and ugly life, the wild free spaces of Scotland, and the rural idyll of the Fenlands, where life is slow, and all is ancient pleasures. There is a delightfully light handed vein of the supernatural in there too, and not _too_ much 'everything would be different if we all just Got Religion'. The first person protagonist is well drawn - you are on his side, but he is at times dim and a bit shitty, it's nice not to get a gloriously talented mary sue taking you through the world.

The things that stood out for me were how little it had dated, and how rich a world it was - the novel was short, but very evocative, it is the type of world that could spawn a million fanfics.

Also, I have finally noticed - when I read dystopias when I was a child, I thought they were warnings about what the world could become. Thus I grew up, became more cynical, and started to think 'this is a stupid dystopia, it wouldn't work because of $plot-hole'. But now I think they are not so much where we might end up in the future, but caricatures of where we are already. And in the same way that it would be missing the point to look at a caricature and think 'no one with legs like that could actually stand up', I think the fact that the dystopia couldn't actually work from a world building point of view isn't as important as I once thought it was.

On the other hand, I did leave the book thinking 'I don't quite get it', which is my vague memory of reading Westall as a child. I'm not a clever reader, I sometimes need to be told, not shown, and I am still a bit confused. What did they actually find out by travelling round Scotland? What was the terrible mistake that the bad guy had made up there? I got the general outline of what his evil masterplan was, but I kept waiting for the reveal of what was the terrible question he had asked the computer, and never noticed it be clearly explained.

Also the book is very rich and very short. It is fun to get 20 amazing ideas every minute, but it might have been nice to spend a bit more time exploring any one of them.

I read this as part of my 'read books that are a bit like the Hunger Games' project. In the Hunger Games, people are forced to offer up their children to a game where they will die, and the government is explicit about it and the people resent it. The number of deaths is relatively small, and each death is significant and watched by the world. In Futuretrack 5, people are enticed into playing games where they will die because it is the only entertainment in town, and there is nothing better to do. And no-one _has_ to die - they get death trap bikes and are placed in situations where mob violence can break out, but a perfect rider would not die, and the mob could chose not to attack. Death is constant and everywhere, and the world focusses on the winners, and ignores those who die. I think Futuretrack 5 is a much more realistic model (both than the Hunger Games and than the 10th Victim) of how a government could use violent games to control people.

But it was a wonderful world to lose myself in for a couple of hours, and one of the delights of lots of unanswered questions is a desire to go back there and look for more answers! ( )