Memini
by Daniel Pearlman

Description:
In Pearlman's novel of Swiftian bite and humor, the world is run by global amnesiacs, the brain-damaged lording it over the mentally sound. The president of Memini, the greatest of the all-powerful megacorporations ("conglobulates") believes that he is still only a high-school senior -- and that he is living inside a videogame that me must outwit in order to graduate. Meminet, the venerable computer personality that manages the managers of Memini, must race to keep its unhinged president from triggering the meltdown of Antarctica and thus destroying civilization.

With stylistic mastery and outlandish inventive power, Perlman takes current trends and tweaks them to their logical conclusions, no matter how absurd. There is nothing in this novel that could not actually happen. People already pop "intelligence-enhancing" pills that in the long run may crippple some of their other mental functions. Perhaps we could one day produce energy from weeds doped with electric-eel genes. And as for uploading our mental contents into a planet-encompassing memory satellite from which each of us may someday be reincarnated, well-known computer scientists are already at work on this project.