Beautiful Soup: A Novel for the 21st Century

by Harvey Jacobs

In a society where people are barcoded to define their social status, James Wander, an A+, has his life turned upside down when a freak accident in a grocery store changes his barcode to that of salt-free pea soup

Genres: Dystopia, Fiction

263 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1992

About the author

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There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_...

Reviews

[Clare O'Beara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written in 1990 when barcodes were just being placed on supemarket goods, this is a satire and dystopia in one.

A New York man with A+ barcode rating, like in Brave New World, with a fortunate life, has an accident while shopping and his barcoded forehead gets imprinted with the code for a can of low sodium pea soup. This is a social disaster since everyone in the world has to have a barcode and is forbidden to alter it. I would have liked to see how the man gets to interact with society some more, but he is soon taken out of society and put in a care home for social outcast prisoners.

If you took out all the references to body parts and bodily functions the book would be at least a quarter shorter. Sadly just about all the rest is garbage, and I don't just mean the floating barge of generations-old garbage that no port will accept. The writing seems to be that mid twentieth century New York style that some authors thought was amusing. It's not.

This is an unbiased review.

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

You are what the bar code on your forehead says. Fates are randomly assigned at birth and all live relatively peaceably in this caste system until an unfortunate accident causes one of the "haves" to question everything. I really enjoyed it and have reread it several times.