THE GESTALT IN THE MACHINE

In this SF thriller, Dornan draws readers into a story of a man who knows too much, set in a simultaneously seedy and glossy world of apps and artificial intelligence.

Adam Arrowman, a tech journalist, finds himself pulled into a massive conspiracy after nearly getting killed during a bombing at a major conference in San Francisco. Soon afterward, one of his idols is gunned down, and as Adam tries to uncover who was behind these events, he becomes entangled in a complex web of technology companies, activist organizations, politicians, and other, shadier groups. As other murders and attacks continue to pile up, Adam, along with his friends, roommates, and a mysterious new ally, find signs that point in the direction of Kelvin Clipper, a tech magnate and AI evangelist. Dornan’s tale follows many of the classic thriller beats, although the investigation is deeply complicated by the instability of information in an age of deepfakes, and the ability of technology to create constant obstacles to discovery. In one instance, for example, a trail of threats and confessions leads to an endlessly deferred chain of IP addresses that go nowhere; in another, Adam can’t tell whether a farewell video, ostensibly created by the first victim, is authentic. As such, the story’s technological aspects are far more than mere set dressing; they deftly marry thriller tropes with thematic concerns about the ways that the technological ambitions of a small subset of the super-rich affect the world at large. Some characters occasionally feel like mouthpieces for various positions within the AI discourse, rather than as fully realized characters: “Forget Earth gradually becoming uninhabitable over centuries; artificial intelligence will kill us sooner than that.” However, they never detract from what is, at its heart, a hypermodern and relevant thriller.

A tense, deftly paced, and timely technological adventure that effectively brings noir sensibility to the age of AI.