Richard Powers

Space Plague (Original Title: Highways In Hiding)

via my collection

Year of Consent

A terrifying and realistic novel of the near future

a.k.a. the year 1990

Security A.D. 1990
It is only 36 years from now. The streets, the buildings, the fields look just as they do today. And the people look the same – until you get close enough to see the bland, vacant stare in their eyes, to hear the empty, guarded quality of their voices.
They are victims of a gigantic con game. Free will, the right of dissent have been washed away in a sea of slogans coined by the public-relations manipulators who have taken over the government. The rare ones who momentarily forget they are no longer individuals have their symptoms recorded by an enormous mechanical brain in Washington. The real dissenters, the incorrigible rebels, have their “Sickness” cured by a simple surgical operation…
This is the year of consent. And this is the story of a man who fought back.

via