Do Spiders Leave Footprints?
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Adrian Keene remembers being bitten by a spider when he was four years old. He remembers the yellow chair it was hiding beneath. The photograph showed a red chair.
Years later, Adrian has helped build Compass: a system designed to reconcile the records on which modern life increasingly depends.
Compass coordinates journeys, hospitals, schools, public information and everyday decisions. It is useful, responsive and usually right. Life becomes safer. Services improve. People learn to trust what works.
But evidence does not merely describe the world. People act on it.
A rumour creates the disruption that appears to confirm it. Police attention makes an accusation look credible. Authentic images acquire meanings they cannot support. Different people receive different—but accurate—accounts of the same decision. Every interpretation changes what happens next, creating new evidence for the people and systems trying to understand it.
Across homes, hospitals, schools, streets and control rooms, people witness fragments of a system nobody can see whole.
Compass can connect those fragments faster than any person. As its success becomes dependence, human beings retain the authority to intervene—but not always the time or practical capacity to do so.
Nothing is obviously broken.
That may be the problem.
*Do Spiders Leave Footprints?* is a near-future literary dystopia about memory, evidence and the systems that become indispensable by being right.
Customer Reviews
Memories are made of this!
We’ve all had those arguments – when we remember certain events from our past differently from our family and friends. Maybe it’s the colour of the dress; maybe it’s who was actually there and who said what.
For most of my lifetime, we've at least had photographs to help settle the debate, and for the last fifteen years there may even have been a social media post to provide another perspective.
However, there are always people off camera. There is always an angle from which that photo has been taken. That leaves the question: which memory is true – the recorded memory or your own memory?
This is the problem which Adrian (the creator of “Compass” – the all pervasive computer system) sets out to solve.
From that premise emerges a world that feels uncomfortably close to our own: It creates a world where computers don’t just present us with suggested options, but actually make the decisions for us. It creates a world where social media runs at such a pace that it’s difficult to unravel the fake news it has produced. It creates a world where a child asks her parents about how on earth they could cope without “Compass” in their lives.
“Do Spiders Leave Footprints” is an accessible, beautifully written novel that explores these themes through the lens of a near-dystopian future. Thought-provoking without being heavy-handed, it raises important questions about memory, truth, technology and human autonomy.
If you enjoy the work of Margaret Atwood, George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, you'll find much to appreciate here.