Technology takes over in Joanna Kavenna’s distressingly dystopian, relevant ‘Zed’

The future is complicated. But that isn’t why Joanna Kavenna’s new dystopian novel “Zed” (Doubleday, 336 pp., ★★★½ out of four stars) triggers an unsettling buzz inside your brain that lasts long after the last page. What’s troubling is that this technology-gone-wrong nightmare feels like a plausible eventuality of today’s most intrusive technological issues.

The story begins a few years from now in London, where corporate exec George Mann murders his wife and two young sons before heading to a nearby pub. The city’s vast network of security cameras locates Mann, but the robotic law enforcement Anti-Terror Droid (ANT) sent to arrest him mistakenly kills an innocent bystander. […]

Click here to view original web page at www.usatoday.com